Cougar release on Tuesday

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