RE: PHP

Carol,

From my perspective, this response is misleading and biased. The crux of
the issue is not understanding what PHP is, and the whole open-source
movement is about.

PHP is a "middlevare" that is used to generate pages dynamically. Its
output is html/css/whatever the browser can display. So, we are talking
about the accessibility of the OUTPUT of a php script, and not the
script itself.

Second, PHP is one (of many) technologies that are labeled as
open-source. By definition, open-source technologies have no "owner" and
anybody can make whatever modifications they want. There is no one
"support" or "development" entity that takes care of things. Unix is the
most recognized example of open-source technology. So, Paul's statement
that "the onus is on the overworked developer", is a comment on the
open-source form is general, and is not particular to accessibility.

Philosophically, this really fits under "give a person a fish vs
teaching him how to fish". If a developer chooses not to understand the
underlying issues, then an "out of the box, proprietary solution" is the
only choice. However, I would argue that this approach will ALWAYS be
less than optimal.

Thanks,

dc

----------------------------------------
David M. Clark
Marathon Ventures
http://www.marathonventures.com
dclark@marathonventures.com
ph: 617/859-3069

-----Original Message-----
From: w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of Carol Foster
Sent: Thursday, January 24, 2002 12:27 PM
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: Re: PHP

The big accessibility issue with PHP and other content management
systems
seems to me to be that the responsibility of entering Web content is
easily
distributed to lots of different people who may not know anything about
Web
accessibility or HTML.

I asked about this recently on the WebAIM list, and Paul Bohman gave a
helpful reply that is in the WebAIM discussion list archives at
http://www.webaim.org/discussion/mail_message.php?id=787

Carol

Ken Reader wrote:

> Has anyone done any work with PHP ?  This is new to me but sounds a
lot
> like ASP and other server side scripting languages.  What about
> accessibility of this language?

Carol Foster, Web Developer
University of Massachusetts, President's Office
http://www.umass-its.net/ipg

Received on Thursday, 24 January 2002 19:00:37 UTC