- From: Charles McCathieNevile <charles@w3.org>
- Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2000 05:44:17 -0400 (EDT)
- To: Ryan Eby <ebyryan@msu.edu>
- cc: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
In other words you had got better information thn I assumed. (Although it is possible to use various plug-ins with browsers such as IE and Netscape to render MathML...) cheers charles On Tue, 10 Oct 2000, Ryan Eby wrote: I may not have went into enough detail first time through. The logic we were using when we did the ASP,XML,XSL approach was to make certain accessibility guidelines easier to accomplish. An example would be checkpoint 3.1, which states that if an appropriate markup exists you should use it. Unfortunately not all browsers support all the languages, so our logic was to use MathML, for instance, in browsers that supported it and send a GIF (with appropriate ALT text) of the equation if the browser did not. Another reason was that some browsers choke on and render stylesheets or markup it doesn't know horribly, so our logic was to send a different stylesheet/markup or none at all depending on the browser. The end product being clean HTML without any hacked areas used to keep a site cross-platform/cross-browser. We never thought of using this method as a sole way of accessibility. Just because someone has a recent browser doesn't mean they don't have JavaScript or images turned off, so the other guidelines were always thought of when designing (still functions without scripts, meaning holds without image, etc.). I just thought this was a good way of meeting some of the guidelines and keeping as clean presentation as possible. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Charles McCathieNevile" <charles@w3.org> To: "Ryan Eby" <ebyryan@msu.edu> Cc: <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org> Sent: Tuesday, October 10, 2000 12:50 PM Subject: Re: How to convince businesses to be accessible... > One problem is that although I use lynx I actually prefer to get the images > included in the source - every so often I decide to look at one, which is > very trivial. > > The basic difficulty is that what browser a user has is not a good guide to > what are the preferences and needs of the user - that needs to be answered by > hte users themselves. W3C is working on a system called CC/PP (that's easier > to remember than the real name) designed to allow this kind of information to > be sent by the browser to the server. And there are in fact a lot of people > using these kinds of approaches. The simplest version is to provide a link to > a text-only version of a page (This is helpful to some users but not by > itself a solution), and there are many other methods used. The trick is to > get the right information about the user and what they want, and that is not > easy. > > Cheers > > Charles McCN > > On Fri, 6 Oct 2000, Ryan Eby wrote: > > A friend of mine did this on his site with ASP (as a learning tool - his > site is not commercial). He wrote all his content in XML pages and then used > a ASP page to check the HTTP header to find the browser version and then > apply a different XSL stylesheet depending on the browser. It was then sent > off to the browser as HTML. If the browser was one that didn't support > images than he used a stylesheet that left out the images and HTML that > might have been a hindrance. It may seem like a lot of work but it really > wasn't. He only created the content once and about a half dozen stylesheets. > And the ASP code he wrote once and then copy and pasted it for the other > pages changes the content variable to point to the proper file. It worked > quite well as far as I could see (on lynx, NS, and IE). I'd give you the > link but he is running it locally on his machine now because of lack of > extra funds for hosting). Are there any problems with this approach that I > am missing. > _____________________________ > Ryan Eby -- 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, Australia September - November 2000: W3C INRIA, 2004 Route des Lucioles, BP 93, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France
Received on Wednesday, 11 October 2000 05:44:18 UTC