- From: Charles McCathieNevile <charles@w3.org>
- Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1999 23:07:42 -0500 (EST)
- To: "B.K. DeLong" <bkdelong@naw.org>
- cc: "'wai list'" <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Read the Story. Personally, I loved it. Lemme explain. Most of the stuff I produce is extremely dull. I don't use stylesheets in my own work because I don't care what it looks like. I don't use TABLE formatting and Font tagging and stuff (much) because I don't care what it looks like and that is like using a bottle opener as a monkey wrench - it works, a bit, but it is a silly thing to do unless it is really important. Innovation is a fantastic thing. Without it there would be no screen readers, no speech input systems, and no web to use them on. What I got out of Lance's article was the suggestion that in our own space we should play. Innovate. Try things out. That was explicit. What seemed implicit was that the purpose of a working website is to transmit information, and that it is important that all users can get that information. Seems to sum up a lot of what WAI is trying to achieve. After all, unless people play with accessible Java, SMIL, CSS, labelling bureaus for undescribed images, rating schemes for accessibility, and the myriad other things that may help to make the web a better place, they will not happen. What I did not get out of the article was the suggestion that accessibility is not important. If that is the real message, which I missed, then I am foolish and Lance is a complete goose. Charles PS I read the article with Lynx. I guess by the time Lynx gets a Javascript interpreter people will be writing more stable scripts, having played with stuff that doesn't really work for long enough to get the real thing right. I hope so - I am very fond of Lynx, but I am going to need to be able to interpret more varieties of active content at some stage. Maybe I'll need to learn a bit more programming and wor out how to add a Java interpreter as well. Now that I have figured out how to get Lynx to display images when I really need it to. On Tue, 26 Jan 1999, B.K. DeLong wrote: Interesting article by Boston Web designer Lance Arthur. He mentions we are part of a vocal monority- let's get vocal: http://www.alistapart.com/stories/lance1.html By Lance Arthur lance@glassdog.com -- B.K. DeLong 360 Huntington Ave. Director Suite 140CSC-305 New England Chapter Boston, MA 02115 World Organization (617) 247-3753 of Webmasters http://www.world-webmasters.org bkdelong@naw.org --Charles McCathieNevile - mailto:charles@w3.org phone: * +1 (617) 258 0992 * http://purl.oclc.org/net/charles W3C Web Accessibility Initiative - http://www.w3.org/WAI 545 Technology sq., Cambridge MA, USA
Received on Wednesday, 27 January 1999 23:07:48 UTC