Accessibility Issues on www-style: Accusations against WAI

For those not already aware, there is a lot of discussion going on
on www-style at the moment, and at least one camp in the discussion is
accusing W3C of holding back the development of the web (personally
I think this is just the normal fallacy that new is always better).

It seems to be across several threads, but basically, at one extreme,
there are people advocating use of XHTML with the intended structural
semantics (a sub-thread is what does semantics mean, though), and at
the other, there are people advocating the use of XML with CSS, with
the XML elements being chosen from the author's unpublished, and possibly
unique to the document, repertoire.

Intermediate levels include the inclusion of an XSLT style sheet to
transform to a published standard, and the use of domain specific 
XML, but with widely published semantics.

Another subthread is the possibility of a metalanguage to describe
the HTML like document structure semantics of the private language
in a similar way to that in which CSS describes its presentational
effect.

NB it is probably not a good idea to actually discuss this on the
WAI list, as many of those, particularly in the ad hoc XML camp, will
not see the discussion.

(Personally I favour not going beyond domain specific languages, and only
using them when there is software available to users to make specific
use of the information.)

Received on Tuesday, 20 August 2002 17:04:00 UTC