- From: David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>
- Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2001 08:28:54 +0000 (GMT)
- To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
> >accessible, but to be honest, a lot of the improvements in web## technology > >in the last 10 years are due to things that seem to not conform with W3C > >accessibility guidelines. We try to keep the page weight down, alas it's This is pretty much the standard "presentationalist" (someone who sees HTML as a page description language, and is generally in the majority of commercial designers++) argument. This view tends to be re-inforced by the 20th century== belief that change is the same as progress, i.e. that more flashy technology must be better than a simple presentation. This is re-inforced by advertisers, as it is often the only way to maintain a revenue stream. On the other hand, it tends to assume that the capabilities are actually new and forgets the fact that HTML *deliberately* rejected existing~~ technologies, e.g. the contemporary versions of PostScript and PDF, as well as various tools for authoring advertising presentations, and what is really happening is the destruction of that distinction and a return to the commercial mainstream (such re-convergence tends to the fate of most succesfful niche standards in computing, e.g. C has got more and more typed). HTML is being used because: 1) browsers are pre-installed; 2) it is fashionable, not because it is the tool that fits what they want to do (page description). The consequence for accessibility is that one probably has to rely on the fact that designers are mistakenly using technology that is capable of high accessibility to get slightly more accessibility than they had intended. ++ In a commercial environment, page coders who veer towards the structuralist position on which the web was based, have to take on a presentationalist persona, as that's what emplyoyers require of them. ## When they say web, they really mean "web browser" delivered multimedia, as few commercial sites contribute to the web of criss-crossing links that was responsible for the name "web" (e.g. see my caveat on purported copyright restriction on deep linking recently). == The 21st century is too new. ~~ For example, the original papers on HTML say that colour has no place in HTML.
Received on Tuesday, 30 October 2001 09:13:36 UTC