RE: Fw: Disturbing trend in tables

Bruce,

     There may be an "untapped market" for the authoring tool you describe,
but I serious doubt it would be "huge" ... And, taking out features folks
commonly use (and they way they use them) is sure to diminish the market
further. If you remove the Underline, you are probably going to make some
folks' lives extra hard as they have to decide how else to express those
items that are customarily underlined, such as titles. (students and profs,
and uni's that publish papers on the web.) Remember that B, I and U are
"crutches" used by sighted folks to interact with text. To kick out the
crutches of some PWD's so that other PWD's don't stumble over them seems a
bit harsh.

	Incidently, after reading that Front Page has no issues with how PWD's use
the web pages it produces, I will continue my recommendation to new web
creators to use it. It is a very easy-to-use authoring tool that can be
learned by folks who *do* something else, and web creations are just
another computer-aided task. Local uni's are teaching Word to teachers who
take their tech enrichment classes. The other software you mentioned all
seemed to have too serious user problems for newbies. 

	Yes, it would be nice if all web authors followed the sage advice of those
who envision a web of this or that, but that's probably about as likely as
picking up a newspaper that does NOT have an error in it. I just talked to
a reporter today about doing a story on the kids' e-mail experience with
Israel, and already know that he's going to get some of the historical data
wrong. He asked how I got my "Israeli contact", and I said it was through
this list, and then had to explain in 10 words, what the WAI is about.
<grin ... I didn't get past the blind using the computers and the web!>

	I truly hope that Front Page has made all possible corrections by the time
teachers come under the government aegis to build pages to a "standard"
outside of how they are intended to be used. I'm using FP98 now, and notice
there is a menu that allows you to set classes and stuff ... but I haven't
explored it further. Seems like recently I've been adding a web page per
week to the kids' site ... and I only have weekend days to do it in. I
can't add but so much extra work. I've made pages in Front Page, and in
Publisher and Front Page which passed Bobby, but they took a lot more time
than the pages I'm doing weekly now.

					Anne

	
	

	




At 01:57 PM 1/16/01 -0500, Bailey, Bruce wrote:
>Ben,
>
>I too wanted to express my gratitude for your attention and contribution to
>this thread.
>
>The problem with omitting (or getting wrong) the doctype in FP2K is similar
>to the issues caused by posting invalid html.  Yes, browsers are suppose to
>recover from these types of errors, but it is quite amateurish for an author
>to rely on this.  It is pretty unexcusable for an automated tool to
>facilitate faults!  We are quite intolerant of syntax errors in C and even
>PDF and Word documents.  Why is HTML an exception to this rule?
>
>Early version of FP caused problems with Netscape because the doctype was
>misleading and inaccurate.  Telling a lie with the doctype is at least as
>much a sin as omitting it!  When MS became aware of the bug, rather than
>fixing it by producing valid HTML, MS chose to remove the doctype
>altogether.  Very pragmatic, but not very comforting!
>
>In short: (1) FP should provide an easy mechanism for including a doctype
>(modifying the normal template doesn't count as "easy").  (2) FP should
>provide validation based on the doctype.  (3) If the user insists on using
>deprecated code, FP should provide a warning and remove the doctype.
>
>Personally, I think there is a huge untapped market for a "WYSIWYG" html
>authoring package that doesn't pretend to do page layout.  It would produce
>only valid HTML 4.01 strict.  If a user wanted fonts, they would have to do
>this via style sheets.  There would be no "indent" button (or it would be
>tied to CSS).  Clicking the large "B" button would produce <em> and not <b>.
>There would NOT be a button for underlining.  Your average home user doesn't
>care about valid html or accessibility.  I would argue that the average site
>manager does.  He (or she) doesn't want (or more likely, can't) to clean up
>after all the dozens of people that are trying to post content on his site.
>A tool that, by default, produced clean code without requiring users to know
>HTML would be most welcomed.  FP and DreamWeaver impose barriers to writing
>valid and/or accessible code.  BBedit and HomeSite are better, but they
>pretty much require one to know and understand HTML.  Amaya has a very
>awkward UI.  To summarize, there are NO easy tools for producing formally
>valid HTML -- even for simple straight forward documents.
>
>The other accessibility problem I know of with FP2K is image maps.  The UI
>provides no mechanism for putting ALT text on the hot spots.  I haven't
>tried this, but does FP do frames?  If so, what does it do for the frame
>labels and the noframes section?
>
>Thanks again.
>
>Sincerely,
>Bruce Bailey
>ED OCIO Assistive Technology Team
>
>
>

Received on Tuesday, 16 January 2001 18:00:33 UTC