- From: Kynn Bartlett <kynn-edapta@idyllmtn.com>
- Date: Wed, 20 Dec 2000 12:35:30 -0800
- To: "David Poehlman" <poehlman1@home.com>
- Cc: <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
At 12:54 PM 12/20/2000 , David Poehlman wrote: >untill is in the guidelines for specific reasons and I suggest that if >you don't know it has come to past regard it as not. It is not hard >to find out whether the untill has been met and there will be another >pack of guidelines for us to learn coming along shortly. I respectfully disagree; "until user agents" has serious problems for any implementor and does not belong in any guidelines which are supposed to actually be followed. It _is_ hard to figure out if a guideline has been met, and the W3C itself does not even undertake to publish a list of which "until user agents" checkpoints have been satisfied by user agents and which have not. There are no standards for determining whether or not an "until user agents" clause has been been met. For that reason, and because it requires an exceptional amount of research -- when the point of guidelines is that web designers don't _have_ to be experts on assistive technology if they follow the guidelines -- the "until user agents" phrasing is being phased out and being replaced with more specific advice and technology-specific checkpoints in future version of WCAG. (Don't believe me that there's no standards? Okay, then tell me this -- how many user agents have to support something for the "until user agents" clause is unnecessary? One? "All" of them? What about older versions of user agents? How long must they be out? What percentage of market penetration is necessary? Does that figure change when talking about assistive tech which is by definition a niche market? How do you measure accurately which user agents are being used? What level of support is necessary? How long do you wait for people to upgrade? Must they be freely available, or is it okay if you have to pay for the upgrade? Does it need to be available on all platforms? Most platforms? Just Windows? Just Mac? Windows, Mac, and Linux? What about Solaris? How about WebTV? Etc, etc, etc. There are no agreed-upon standards for resolving "until user agent" clauses, and thus it makes a checkpoint vague, and vagueness in checkpoints is very undesirable.) --Kynn -- Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com> http://kynn.com/ Director of Accessibility, Edapta http://www.edapta.com/ Chief Technologist, Idyll Mountain Internet http://www.idyllmtn.com/ AWARE Center Director http://www.awarecenter.org/ What's on my bookshelf? http://kynn.com/books/
Received on Wednesday, 20 December 2000 16:03:07 UTC