Re: QUESTION: Redacted testimony

Hmm. There is a basic problem here - if the content is shipped out as part of
the source then it would only take a reasonably bright 9 year old to figure
out how to find out what was hidden. I suggest you physically delete the
stuff, and add a note saying "[redacted testimony]" in its place.

Charles McCN

On Mon, 24 Jul 2000, Christopher Atkinson wrote:

  "Redacted" is lawyer-speak for taking a big, black magic marker and crossing
  out items in a document that the redactor thinks are confidential. A typical
  case is items released by United States government agencies under the
  Freedom of Information Act, where they cross out every word but "the". (In
  response to Mr. Bailey's separate post, the thread he cited concerned a
  blacklined document, lawyer-speak for <INS> and <DEL>. Jeez, and people
  think computers have jargon!)
  
  I'm not quite sure what stretching a black pixel means. Would this approach
  work properly where a user was using a large font?
  
  One alternate approach would be to use Cascading Style Sheets. The danceable
  example below seems to work okay on Netscape 4.7 and Internet Explorer 5.01.
  
  This approach allows the redacted material to scale with the font the
  browser is using. It would not work well where the browser was using a user
  style sheet which set colors. (There might be a JavaScript-based solution to
  this.)One word of caution: I read someplace that using the same
  background-color and text color is considered spamming by some search
  engines. I do not know if this applies to CSS. I also do not know if you
  want these pages spidered in any event.
  
  Would this approach be better from an accessibility standpoint, or am I
  taking the commandment that "Thou Shalt Use CSS Always" in too
  fundamentalist a spirit?
  
  Regards,
  
  Chris Atkinson
  
  EXAMPLE FOLLOWS:
  
  <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0//EN"
  "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/strict.dtd">
  <HTML>
    <HEAD>
  	 <TITLE>The Richard Roundtree Flick That Dare Not Speak Its Name</TITLE>
  <STYLE>
  	 .redacted {
  	 background-color: #000000;
  	 color: #000000;
  	 }</STYLE>
    </HEAD>
    <BODY>
  	 <P>Q: Who's the black private dick that's a sex machine to all the
  		chicks?</P>
  	 <P>A: <SPAN CLASS="redacted">{Confidential Material Deleted}</SPAN></P>
  	 <P>Q: You're damn right! Who is the man that would risk his neck for his
  		brother man?</P>
  	 <P>A: <SPAN CLASS="redacted">{Confidential Material Deleted}</SPAN></P>
  	 <P>Q: Can ya dig it? Who's the cat that won't cop out when there's danger
  		all about? </P>
  	 <P>A: <SPAN CLASS="redacted">{Confidential Material Deleted}</SPAN></P>
  	 <P>Q: Right on! You see this cat <SPAN CLASS="redacted">{Confidential
  		Material Deleted}</SPAN> is a bad mother<SPAN
  CLASS="redacted">{Confidential
  		Material Deleted}</SPAN></P>
  	<P>A: Hush your mouth!</P>
  	<P>Q: But I'm talkin' about <SPAN CLASS="redacted">{Confidential
  		Material Deleted}</SPAN></P>
  		<P>A: Then we can dig it!</P>
  		<P>Q: He's a complicated man but no one understands him but his woman</P>
  		<P>A: <SPAN CLASS="redacted">{Confidential
  		Material Deleted}</SPAN></P>
  
  	</BODY>
  </HTML>
  

--
Charles McCathieNevile    mailto:charles@w3.org    phone: +61 (0) 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative                      http://www.w3.org/WAI
Location: I-cubed, 110 Victoria Street, Carlton VIC 3053
Postal: GPO Box 2476V, Melbourne 3001,  Australia

Received on Monday, 24 July 2000 23:38:43 UTC