- From: David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>
- Date: Wed, 19 Nov 2003 07:51:27 +0000 (GMT)
- To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
> Where is your evidence that the great > preponderance of people with relevant > disabilities are *not* using "recent desktop > graphical browsers"? Basically from observing what non-disabled people in a relatively affluent country do. It actually surprised me how recent a browser you need to avoid this problem. I checked the browsers on my office system. This is next machine in line on the replacement cycle, but whilst not replacing as often as financial institutions, we do replace more frequently than some public service organisations. The last time I checked, my office was in South London, not Outer Mongolia. The OS is NT 4 workstation, which is past end of life for Microsft (but Microsoft has had to revise up lifetimes for current products because the end of life it used for NT 4 doesn't reflect when people stop using it in practice). (NT 4 Server is still supported.) I think I've done a browser update on this. I've certainly added all service packs and hot fixes except for the attempt to push IE 6 onto me as a critical update. The primary browser is IE 5.5, which is still receiving hot fixes. I have also updated at least some of the standard fonts. Other developers are likely to have IE 6, but operations people, depending on when their systems were updated, are likely to be on the original browser from that time. The test was to send the superset character as both &#x and &# forms. Superset as it was one of the semantically valid characters assuming that the detail was on the right (many suggest detail on left is better, for left to right reading order). IE 5.5 failed the test. It displayed two missing glyph box The other browsers I checked (these are from when I was involved with code that generated HTML, and are mainly considered "don't care" by the marketing people) were: NS 4.75 failed - two question marks. WebTVViewer 2.0 failed - uninterpreted entity for &#x and question mark for the decimal one Mozilla 0.9.3 (the Netscape 6 I have is older) displayed both correctly. Amaya V5.0 worked (this is quite old). Lynx 2.8.1rel1 made an attempt although the charecter wasn't particularly recognizable. Note that, as well as the mainstream browser failing: - it is actually all the obscure browsers that got things right, even though they were quite old; - the target market for Web TV is unlikely to upgrade for something like ten years (my home TV is about 17 years old) and is likely to include the elderly, who are more likely to be disabled. NT 4 is Unicode aware. I haven't tried these in the Windows 98 partition at home; Windows 98 is not Unicode aware although is still supported by Microsoft; that might mean that IE 5.5 tries to compensate more. The Symbol font was not Unicode encoded and the superset character is not in the updated core fonts, so the browsers that worked, could only have been doing so by using a hack which meant it had specific knowledge of Symbol (there were some residual Star Office fonts, so just maybe these were properly encoded and found). Explicitly hinting to IE that it should use Symbol didn't work. I'm assuming you are not proposing the misrepresentation of a character below U+0100 and a specific font selection! This is the test code: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <title>d:\superset2.html</title> </head> <body> ⊃ ⊃
Received on Wednesday, 19 November 2003 03:15:13 UTC