Re: Automated Accessibility Options

On Monday, Jan 13, 2003, at 10:31 Australia/Melbourne, Nick Kew wrote:

> On Mon, 13 Jan 2003, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
>> you should probably look at CC/PP [1] as similar work
>
> Are you sure about that?  My concern is that RDF introduces a whole
> new level of complexity, that doesn't really seem justified in
> such a simple negotiation.  Unless perhaps we reduce it in the
> manner of dc: in HTML <meta> elements?
>
> One of the objectives of mod_accessibility is to be a low-overhead
> solution: it is by nature *much* faster and less obtrusive than betsie.
> HTTP headers are well-suited to a lean-and-mean system; RDF less so.

I am sure you should look at CC/PP... Actually I am not certain that 
the use of RDF does increase the overhead unjustifiably. The problem 
with using anything else is keeping track of the possibilities (what is 
the relationship between a 'betsie' view and a linearised one, ...) and 
how they relate. The size of the overhead is an important question, but 
there are limits to what can sensibly be done by using 
X-some-unknown-extension and on a wide scale it seems to me that 
something more than plain text strings is important.

>> 	 (it is about
>> providing profiles of user agents to make sure they get sent
>> appropriate content, which I think is pretty much what you are talking
>> about).
>
> Not entirely.  The idea is not that the browser has a preferred version
> (though it may do within different renditions), but that the user will
> wish to switch frequently between different versions.

Exactly. CC/PP does allow for this - preferences are not necessarily 
applied for more than a single request, and so you could ask for a 
handful of different renderings one after the other.

>>    As far as I know there are no existing vocabularies which deal
>> with user requirements other than basic hardware profiles, but the
>> framework for them should work, and it would be, in my opinion, an
>> important implementation demonstration.
>
> Sure, the HTTP headers for this could be expressed as an RDF 
> vocabulary.

I was thinking more about showing an implementation of the system 
working - a browser that allowed for requests, a server that was 
answering them, and the ability to change preferences on the fly... An 
essential component is, of course, a service that is producing these 
different versions.

cheers

Chaals

--
Charles McCathieNevile           charles@sidar.org
Fundación SIDAR                       http://www.sidar.org

Received on Sunday, 12 January 2003 18:45:28 UTC