Re: Multiple versions of a web page

At 7:13 AM -0500 12/24/01, David Poehlman wrote:
>please explain what is more or less elligant?

An "elegant" solution is one which cleanly and tidily solves the
problems and requires no particular "nasty hacks or kludges" to get
around.  For most programmers or software developers, a nice elegant
solution is much preferable to a quick and dirty fix.  Elegant
solutions tend to be closer to the standard in both a literal meaning
and in intent, but may be less effective in practice.

For example, consider the case of "D-links".  D-links are _not_ an
elegant solution.  They put up a dirty little blue "d" on the screen
and they're not clear how they work or why, if you don't know what they
are.  But they _do_ provide access to the longer description of the
graphical object.

The LONGDESC attribute, on the other hand, is closer to the idea
of an "elegant" solution, as it uses an established mechanism within
HTML -- linking via an attribute -- to identify the longer
description.  However, it fails in practice, since it's not widely
supported by browsers.  (Is it supported by any mainstream
browsers these days?)

An even more elegant solution would be probably be something using
XLink and the content of the <img> element, to provide a fallback
that is going to be accessible even to older browsers -- you can
do this with <object> for example.  (The fallback via content
part, not the XLink part.)

--Kynn

-- 
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com>                 http://kynn.com
Chief Technologist, Idyll Mountain            http://idyllmtn.com
Web Accessibility Expert-for-hire          http://kynn.com/resume
January Web Accessibility eCourse           http://kynn.com/+d201

Received on Monday, 24 December 2001 14:53:44 UTC