- From: Al Gilman <asgilman@access.digex.net>
- Date: Fri, 27 Jun 1997 15:55:48 -0400 (EDT)
- To: w3c-wai-wg@w3.org (WAI Working Group)
to follow up on what Daniel Dardailler said: > > Cougar (aka HTML 4.0) should be released to the public next Tuesday > (July 1st). I'll try to have the Cougar authors incorporate some of > the comments received on this list before Tuesday. > We have to face the fact that this release was completed without sufficient accessibility review. To make the CSS strategy work for multimode web documents, I think we will need to adjust HTML so that the base under the style sheets is cleaner from a semantic perspective. We can now see examples of evidence that it should change. We cannot by Tuesday make a responsible recommendation on how it should change. I have not seen mail indicating results of the Cougar Review action item for me to comment on, for example. > > > For maximum flexibility, it would be preferable that users be able > > to deactivate persistent styles in all cases and substitute their > > own preferences for those of the author. (I offer this as a > > suggestion for further discussion). > > [also in reply to Al's section "Full user control over style"] > > This is (was) a political battle. The way it was explained to be a > while ago was that HTML authors would not agree to using Style Sheet > if they were not given a way to "hard-code" their visual presentation > (which for them equals real content). It had to be in the spec. This > is what persistent is all about. > > I'm not sure if the idea put forward in Als' section "Confirm > overrides of essential styles" were studied. I'll ask Hakon. > I am reading "This was a political battle" to mean that there was an heated discussion with opposing points of view expressed. I do not believe that at that time the accessibility perspective was adequately represented in the discussion. I think that the WAI needs to bring members of the authoring community into the WAI process so that we can expose the real issues and work out a better deal, because the last deal broke disabled access. I expect that if we review alternatives and tradeoffs with representative content writers and readers, we can work something out that we can all live with. At the moment I am afraid that if we don't reserve to the reader final control over all styling, we will either (1) alienate too many readers or (2) leave some disability group with no access. Those things are not good for the writer. I am prepared to listen and iterate. I don't really see how we could possibly close this issue before Tuesday. In other words, the Cougar Team can make whatever calls they want to to meet Tuedsay's release deadline. We have a lot of work to do before we understand what, if any, changes are required in HTML to make accessibility of Web pages universal. -- Al Gilman
Received on Friday, 27 June 1997 15:55:49 UTC