- From: Seth Rothberg <sethmr@bellatlantic.net>
- Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2001 17:00:35 -0500
- To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Hi Scott, I've been following this discussion with interest and would like to suggest to you some seat-of-the-pants web design answers to a couple of the issues you've raised. 1. You ask how much work is needed to learn what degrading gracefully means. My answer is that it takes a little time and not much work. Do what every web page creator has been encouraged to do from day one: look at your page in multiple browsers and multiple versions of a given browser. Do you want to know what a linearized table looks like? Look at it in a browser that doesn't support tables. 2. You seem to be saying that designers need not bother learning how pages degrade if they can just serve up multiple versions of a web site. If I've understood you correctly, it seems to me that just the opposite is true. How are you going to serve your page to a web tv user, a person with a pda, a visitor using netscape 4.08 if you don't know how each of their user agents renders html? And because I'm designing by the seat of my pants here, trying to be practical rather than theoretical, I know right away that to implement multiple versions of a site I'm either going to need a sniffer or an accessible intro page that allows a visitor to choose which version of the site he or she would like to browse. The browser sniffer bothers me because I've never seen one that isn't creaky and full of holes, that doesn't misread visitor's browsers. The intro page solution bothers me because I don't want visitors to have to fill in a form just to visit my site. If there are other ways of serving muliple versions, please let me know. So what should a seat-of-the pants web designer who wants to make accessible page do? Well one thing, would be to use html properly. In short, don't use <font size="+4"> when you can use <h1>. Does that make a site accessible. Probably not. But maybe it's a good start. Seth
Received on Monday, 24 December 2001 17:01:10 UTC