RE: "untill user agents" retired?

> David Poehlman

> I see bank machines, atms of other natures, cell phones and 
> other "user  
> agents" still sorely lacking in the ability to provide feedback to  
> the user in the same way that some of the older user agents had  
> issues so to my mind, we're still in the until phase.

> In other words, it's fine not to implement where not  
> needed but some how, we need also to have implementation where  
> necessary.

Of course you need a pragmatic approach: if there are some real-world
issues, they need to be addressed. However, I'd rather see a "clean"
set of guidelines, which assume a baseline of compliant user agents,
possibly backed up by a separate "what about older/non-compliant user
agents" document with techniques to accommodate them.

In general, I'd love to see the issue you mention addressed not by
maintaining "until user agent" guidelines, but by strong lobbying
to get the manufacturers of these non-compliant user agents to follow
UAAG and support web standards. Otherwise, we may as well include long
sections on "how to deal with IE5.0 and Netscape 4.x" in the guidelines
as well...

Patrick
________________________________
Patrick H. Lauke
Web Editor / University of Salford
http://www.salford.ac.uk
________________________________
Web Standards Project (WaSP) Accessibility Task Force
http://webstandards.org/
________________________________

Received on Tuesday, 31 January 2006 14:42:14 UTC