- From: Jon Gunderson <jongund@staff.uiuc.edu>
- Date: Wed, 03 Feb 1999 16:44:58 -0600
- To: w3c-wai-ua@w3.org
JRG is Jon Gunderson and CO is Chuck Opperman. << JRG: The issue of using DOM is about more than just rendering tables, since it exposes the entire document structure to assistive technology for navigation and alternative rendering. >> CO: Of course, we provide that. << JRG: Does Active Accessibility currently or plan to provide structural relationahips between elements in a document? >> CO: Yes, Active Accessibility support to HTML provides a child-parent object hierarchy similar, but not identical, to the existing Dynamic HTML object model. << JRG: Does Acive Accessibility currently or plan to provide information on element content and their attributes? >> CO: Element content - yes. Attributes - some. Stylistic things such as font, color, etc are not exposed currently. Things such as location, purpose, URL values, etc. are exposed. << JRG: Why is a range based model important? >> CO: I'm not an expert on document object models, but I believe that selecting runs of characters, regardless of structure is very important to the manipulation of the content. DOM1 didn't provide this and Dynamic HTML in IE4 had limited support for it. DOM2 is adding this and IE5 has also made improvements in this area. My point was that DOM is not universal. It's a HTML-based object model that will not fit the needs of higher-end text engines. Word's object model is very different and much richer than what can be expressed in HTML. It's also optimized to editing of documents, whereas DOM is optimized to the manipulation of structure. Jon Gunderson, Ph.D., ATP Coordinator of Assistive Communication and Information Technology Division of Rehabilitation - Education Services University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign 1207 S. Oak Street Champaign, IL 61820 Voice: 217-244-5870 Fax: 217-333-0248 E-mail: jongund@uiuc.edu WWW: http://www.staff.uiuc.edu/~jongund http://www.als.uiuc.edu/InfoTechAccess
Received on Wednesday, 3 February 1999 17:47:10 UTC