- From: David Poehlman <poehlman1@home.com>
- Date: Wed, 20 Dec 2000 16:19:13 -0500
- To: "Kynn Bartlett" <kynn-edapta@idyllmtn.com>
- Cc: <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
you made my point. there will be a new set of guidelines. No. It is not hard. Let's leave ats out of it. They should not figure in for much longer anyway if we have this seemless web we are all dreaming of and working for. I don't want to belabor this but you seem intent on it so let's proceed. You are going beyond the rasionalle of the guidelines with your extreme examples. It sounds not veague at all to me. I don't even understand some of what you say. the reason the until is in there is that there is cooperation between the working groups and user agents will and untill they do fullfill a set of defined parameters in order to comply with other guideline sets there must be room to work. you see the glass as half empty it seems, I see it as half full. The untill will slide away gradually as we move closer to the goal we all seek. then, we'll start working on email guidelines. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Kynn Bartlett" <kynn-edapta@idyllmtn.com> To: "David Poehlman" <poehlman1@home.com> Cc: <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org> Sent: December 20, 2000 3:35 PM Subject: Re: untill: 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 16:19:12 UTC