User Agent Working Group Teleconference, 2 July 1998

Attendees

Chair
Jon Gunderson
Scribe
Kitch Barnicle
Present

UA Guidelines at Geneva AC meeting

Daniel Dardailler presented UA guidelines at the Geneva conference. People seemed particularly interested in usability - trying to build a line between usability & accessibility

Re-chartering the User Agent Working Group

Our original went for six months - we need to re-charter ourselves We need to fill in more detail, particularly schedules and process issues.

Action Jon: Post a draft revised charter for comments

Action Group: Review draft in preparation for July 15th meeting.

Note. Public working draft of guidelines needs to be republished with a change in the style sheet, that will take place within the next week.

Action Ian: Republish public draft of UA Guidelines with small fixes.

Action Ian: Publish new WG draft of UA Guidelines with email integrated next week.

DLINK

See Issue #1.

DD: Dlink - UA should deal with longdesc, dlink is primarily for legacy apps.

Jon: dlink needed for objects eg. If people hard coded dlink and rel tag was dlink, browser could hide dlinks, some people want dlink rendered

We need to coordinate the dlink issue with the page author guidelines working group.

Action Chair: coordinate dlink issue with Page Author Guidelines WG.

Proposals to add dlink to OBJECT element:

  1. Use PARAM element.
  2. Hard code dlink.

For those who want hardcoded dlink - for an image or for an old browser is there something the browser can do to identify the dlink?

With regard to images - people will use longdesc if they expect users will be using the latest browsers that support it (eventually) or use dlink if they expect people will be using older browsers

DD: -dlink does need browser support if you want to hide them or navigate through them, but browser doesn't know it's a dlink until we add an attribute (e.g., rel)

DD: Object - another issue - if object replaces image - may not happen in short term - issue: content of object is "alt" - where do you put longdesc - can add in element - or we can develop a more formal way of indicating that there is a description - e.g., PARAM, rel

Direct Navigation

See Issue #2.

Current guidelines adequately address the direct navigation issue. Searching for anchors and alt text should be added as options in the search dialog box and made into a separate item in the guidelines. Focus should move to focusable elements found by search feature????

Add to guidelines: new options for a browser's search command - 1) search only links 2) search alt text

Action editors: Add to guidelines

Ian: Do we need to mention voice activation as well as keyboard?

No - we will stick with keyboard, most basic. Can add statement that UA should not be input mode dependent.

Section 6.4 keyboard to access history can be removed, it is a basic browser feature and all browser features should be keyboard accessible.

Action editors: Remove section 6.4

New Issues: XML, SMIL, MathML

SMIL - will probably be an external player

MathML - will be integrated into regular browsers - how should the UA group address these issues- should we form subgroup?

We need to see how the other WAI groups are looking at these issues.

Action Items for subgroups: Review what has already been done, and make recommendations on what the UA group should be doing. Report back to the group on the August 12th meeting. Post related materials as they become available.

MathML subgroup

SMIL subgroup

Daniel can report activities from PF group