Re: [media] Making Sites Accessible Makes Sense For All Customers

> accessibility?  JavaScript, and it's international standard ECMAScript,

ECMAScript support would be relatively easy to give to Lynx, but when
people say Javascript, they nearly always mean DOM0.  There is no
standard for DOM0, it is the name given the DOM2 standard for the
de facto mix of capability in NS4- and IE.  The Netscape DOM0 is based
on a document model that is incompatible with W3C HTML (layers).  The
true definition of the Netscape DOM0 is not too well defined because the
object model it uses is not a proper SGML parse tree, but the lazy parse
tree that Netscape creates internally - optional tags often result in an
inferred element not being represented in the DOM, whereas it would be
respresented in a W3C one (this may be more a CSS problem, as NS doesn't
provide as rich a DOM as IE).

> was invented to solve some real problems.  Why can't lynx "get with it" and

Almost certainly the whole of the parser and rendering engines would have
to be re-written.  A lot of work would have to be done to reverse 
engineer big 2 behaviour.  To get full benefit from Javascripted pages,
it would probably have to model a pixel addressable GUI and then try to
map that back into character cell displays of the overlaid elements.  Many
Lynx users don't have mice, so there would have to awkward work arounds for
onclick (NB click events get optional parameters about button and shift
key states - shift key states may not be available from remote terminals.
Mouseovers are going to be impossible to emulate comfortably from remote
terminals.  How many people would bother to switch alt text when switching
images, and might that just irritate users of screen readers.

An alternative approach of producing a text only Mozilla was suggested, but
I gather it is almost as difficult to do this as to re-write Lynx to emulate
DOM0.

The market for Lynx tends to include people who have not got large disposable
incomes, so businesses are not really interested in enhancing it, which means
it has to be maintained in people's spare time.  It is already at the limits
of maintainability, partly because of all the workarounds it needs for
broken and badly written HTML.

Received on Wednesday, 14 February 2001 18:55:00 UTC