Comments on http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/WD-WAI-USERAGENT-19980618

Greetings:

Thank you for releasing the working draft of the user agent guidelines.
For the most part, it looks fine but it is lacking examples for those
of us that aren't quite up to snuff on all the topics.  I often found 
myself scratching my head thinking "just what do they mean here?"  If
each priority had an example, I think it would help clarify things.

In addition, there seems to be a strong lack of reasons why the priorities 
are there.  Are these meant to be handled in a separate document?  If
not, they should be included here.  I sometimes found myself asking just 
why a particular priority was necessary, and I've been working in the
accessibility field for about 8 years.  I can only imagine what a browser
developer with no experience in accessibility would think.  

Thanks again for the early look.  My specific comments are attached 
below.

Will

Section 3.3:  The "current user selection" and "current focus" are
	      mentioned in the Terms and Definitions section, but 
	      I could not find a definition of them.  

Section 3.4:  "D-links should be identified in the document source
	      by giving the 'rel' attribute the value 'dlink.'"  
	      Will the the "dlink" link type eventually make it into
	      the HTML specification?  I couldn't find it in the
	      following URL:  

		http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/types.html#type-links
	      
Section 3.5:  Thank you for mentioning that most of the guidelines
	      in the document apply to 'dependent' user agents.  This
	      helped clarify a lot of things, and it might be helpful
	      to mention this earlier (e.g., the abstract).

Section 4.1:  Bullet item 3.  What do you mean by "custom settings
	      in profiles that may be shared"?  An example here might
	      help clarify this.  For example, what will share these
	      settings?

Section 4.4:  I think it is good that you have a section on alternative
	      representations of multimedia, but one thing that seems
	      to be missing is how this is going to be done.  Given
	      that this type of data might be presented using a third
	      party plug-in, there should be some standard way for the 
	      browser to tell the plug-in to do something.  Otherwise,
	      it seems as though these priorities will be very difficult
	      to meet.

Section 4.1:  SUNSoft should be Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Section 4.6:  I understand the desire to provide better access to 
	      tables so today's screen readers can do the right thing.
	      Does serialization help with this?  Has anyone done any
	      studies to determine that this works?  It surely won't
	      work for those pages where the authors use tables for
	      the sole purpose of doing tricky visual layouts.

Section 6.1:  I think I understand the reason to be able to go from 
	      link to link and form control to form control, but what
	      is the requirement for going from longdesc to longdesc
	      for?

Section 6.5:  Why is source order more important than rendered order?

Section 7.1:  Bullet item 1.  This probably should just be something
	      like "provide the ability for the user to directly customize
	      the configuration of the accessibility features."  The idea
	      of a centralized dialog box makes me think of some humongous
	      dialog box that is difficult to use by anyone.

Section 9.3:  Since the X Window System is available on more than just
	      Sun machines, the title should probably reflect this.  
	      Maybe "AccessX/The X Window System" or something like
	      that would be more appropriate.

Section 10.2: Sun should be referred to as Sun Microsystems, Inc.  If 
	      you want to include a URL, http://www.sun.com/access should
	      be fine.

Thanks again!

Will

Received on Tuesday, 23 June 1998 13:46:48 UTC