- From: Charles McCathieNevile <charles@w3.org>
- Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2001 09:38:40 -0500 (EST)
- To: Joseph Kesselman <keshlam@us.ibm.com>
- cc: Ray Whitmer <rayw@netscape.com>, Al Gilman <asgilman@iamdigex.net>, Richard Schwerdtfeger <schwer@us.ibm.com>, Jon Gunderson <jongund@uiuc.edu>, "Ian B. Jacobs" <ij@w3.org>, Philippe Le Hegaret <plh@w3.org>, <w3c-wai-ua@w3.org>, <www-dom@w3.org>
Well, I have a couple of concerns. One is that in the future we create content that is semantically rich enough to be use in different modes or devices. And that is where I think we can have the most impact in the long term, although almost none in the short term. Another is that there is a large amount of content out there right now that people need to use in order to participate in society, but cannot, be cause it is badly coded in languages that in any event only provide some support for accessibility. So I am extremely keen to see new languages, especially those coming from W3C, use a proper semantically rich method for interaction. I am also keen to se support for people having some way to get to poorly designed content which is nevertheless a real part of their life today. I am not suree if the solutions are the same in both cases, but I suspect they are related. In particular, ecuase if we provide one method for today and a totally incompatible method for the future, we will be stuck with the problem of people refusing to implement the new method because they will claim that people are used to the old method and it more or less works. Cheers Charles On Fri, 21 Dec 2001, Joseph Kesselman wrote: On Wednesday, 12/19/2001 at 03:36 PST, rayw@netscape.com (Ray Whitmer) wrote: > Why is everyone so opposed to adding a level that is properly semantic? I suspect people are looking for a magic bullet which will work with existing, unmodified, badly coded web pages. Given that the WAI folks have issued other guidelines on how websites should be (re)written for accessiblity, that goal seems unreasonable even if it was achievable... and I doubt it's achievable. There's a reason HTML was originally so bare-bones; it was _intended_ to be semantic markup, which different browsers could style differently. Then everyone started adding features which defeated that goal. The proper solution is not to try to kluge around those features, but to abstract them back to the semantic layer and work with that. Which is part of what the XML and stylesheet efforts were all about. ______________________________________ Joe Kesselman / IBM Research -- Charles McCathieNevile http://www.w3.org/People/Charles phone: +61 409 134 136 W3C Web Accessibility Initiative http://www.w3.org/WAI fax: +1 617 258 5999 Location: 21 Mitchell street FOOTSCRAY Vic 3011, Australia (or W3C INRIA, Route des Lucioles, BP 93, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France)
Received on Sunday, 23 December 2001 09:38:44 UTC