- From: Charles McCathieNevile <charles@w3.org>
- Date: Mon, 6 Aug 2001 08:13:25 -0400 (EDT)
- To: David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>
- cc: <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
On Sun, 5 Aug 2001, David Woolley wrote: The advantage of only linking is that it forces one to consider relevance. Embedding encourages the use of decorative material, whereas out of line material has to be of real relevance, otherwise people will not follow the links. CMN Yes, but this is not in any way restricted to the use of multimedia - this applies for all content. The trick is to have the right balance of between what is included and what is linked. DJW If they can only get an idea of the topics, they may well be in the wrong place. There is still a strong case for presenting completely different material to people with different intellectual levels or background knowledge, and, in many cases different organisations may be best suited to communicating at the different levels. It can even be dangerous to get a partial understanding (there are many examples, but, for example CPR applied inappropriately can kill). CMN There are cases where presenting multiple forms of content are important, and as you say there are cases where it needs to be done right. (CPR is only meant to be used on people who are effectively dead, by people who _might_ be able to save them). But there are many more cases where extending access to information is not dangerous, but helpful. Certainly WCAG techniques need to deal with multiple versions of content, but situational restrictions are the responsibility of individual content producers, and they should get their information from appropriate sources (copyright is another example of something that has relationships in implementation but is beyond the scope of WCAG). [semantic web stuff snipped from this mail] DJW The main long term constraint is not so much technology as the cost of entry in terms of assembling a multi-disciplinary team to create a small web site. Given that I treat accessibility as being more than just accessibility for physically and mentally disabled, there is a danger that you will be denying accessibility to publish. CMN What we will be doing is denying that content is accessible just because it was the best that some team managed to produce, and actually pointing out what it needs to do in order to achieve "complete" accessibility (well, that is probably impossible, but the closer we get to that goal the better in terms of what we are trying to do here). Cheers Charles
Received on Monday, 6 August 2001 08:14:08 UTC