Re: Enumeration of EventListeners in DOM Level 3 Events

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
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Received on Sunday, 23 December 2001 09:38:44 UTC