RE: FWD: CHI-WEB: Amazon's version for the Visually Impaired

Maybe the last post was a bit of an overstatement.  HTML will without doubt
continue for a long time as do all legacy technologies.

The point I was trying to make was that the 2.0 guidelines have been writen
now with access to many new techniques for making things accessible which
did not exist when the 1.0 Guidelines were written.  2.0 presuposes that
these technologies exist, it seems to me the reason that statements such
as....until user agents support... are not so apparent.

To use another context as we are really talking about discrimination, until
two years ago in my town in order not to discriminate against people it was
esential that alternative transport was provided (such as Multi purpose
taxis) for people using wheelchairs who were unable to use busses.
Suddenly someone got the bright idea of making bussess accessible.  The old
guidelines specifying alternate transport was needed suddenly became
irrelevent,  but of course they still apply when legacy busses are used.

To me the web is the same.  Once we sometimes had to provide basic
alternatives and of course the guidelines had to specify this but now using
available technology we can achieve the aim of not discriminating in another
way, hence the new guidelines.

Of course those who are writng the guidelines would be the best to answer
what they intend.


Harry Woodrow



-----Original Message-----
From: w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org]On
Behalf Of Scott Luebking
Sent: Saturday, 15 December 2001 10:42 AM
To: harrry@email.com; phoenixl@sonic.net; poehlman1@home.com;
w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: RE: FWD: CHI-WEB: Amazon's version for the Visually Impaired


Hi,

Oh, I thought that 2.0 was going to replace 1.0.  Most standards
seem to work that way.  If the situal is as you mention, what about
web pages generated from relational databases where XML is not involved?

Scott

> My understanding of the 2.0 Guidlines were that they did not apply at all
to
> HTML.  HTML was covered by the 1.0 guidelines and the HTML 4 standards are
> now fixed and no more work is to be done on them. As I understand it the
> provision that text only sites should be a last resort still applies to
HTML
> sites.
> THe 2.0 guidelines are designed to cover the changed circumstance that XML
> is the current way to present content and Presentation is separated by
such
> technologies as Cascading Style Sheets.
> This means that we cannot be refering to "one set of HTML code".
>
> Harry Woodrow

Received on Friday, 14 December 2001 22:14:16 UTC