- From: <charles@sidar.org>
- Date: Sun, 5 Jun 2005 08:04:06 -0400 (EDT)
- To: wai-xtech@w3.org
- Cc: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org, www-html@w3.org
[the Cc list is getting out of hand here...] My mate John Foliot said, inter alia... > I have argued that the author must not have > control over the end user's behavior norms, and allowing the content > author > to bind *their* idea of what is 'best' is wrong; it flys in the face of > numerous other ideals and precedents, Actually it follows the CSS precedent. Authors propose a default - and the harder they work to make sure their default is compatible with similar sites the better, but we are talking about the area beyond useful formal standardisation. (That is the area covered by rel attributes in HTML4, where behaviour standardises on a per-browser basis). But in this case the author's suggestion has to be subject to the browser, as well as to the user's demands. The alternative to having the author pick keys is to have the browser assign them according to some kind of algorithm. Nothing stops the browser doing this, so if it is useful you can expect good browsers to offer the possibility. For example if a role is a subtype of a known role where a user has expressed a preference. Or if a common set of bindings for roles in a given language are published, a user may prefer everything relevant be remapped to those bindings. (These two example can, of course, be combined). But if someone comes up with something that is apparently entirely new, what is the best shortcut? Let's not think about search, because that is covered by the rel attribute. Instead let's think of the functionality of retrieving photo descriptions from a description broker - something that could become a big service but currently isn't. It seems to me useful to *allow* the author to *suggest* a default binding.Users don't want to have to suggest it until they actually need to use it and decide that it doesn't make sense so they should re-map it. Computers are not that good at user interface design. Which leaves me with the content author as the best person to give an *initial suggestion*. cheers Chaals -- Charles McCathieNevile chaals@opera.com Here's one we prepared earlier: http://www.opera.com/download
Received on Sunday, 5 June 2005 12:08:13 UTC