Re: [css3-ui] Problems with :read-only and :read-write

> > The issue is that the HTML/CSS consortium is affecting not just
> > myself, but millions if not billions of users around the world, many
> 
> I think you are failing to realise that W3C is fighting a rearguard
> action here.  That's particularly true on HTML; CSS people tend to take
> more of a presentational view from the start.  If W3C simply followed
> the desires of its member companies, I think we would have just had more
> presentational features in HTML, and no separation of styling. In the
> end, only legislation achieves accessibility, and even then designers
> will look for loopholes.

Is the consensus of people not me in this group that HTML/CSS can't be
made accessible by default? We don't live in a world limited by
physics (outside of hardware) so why not come up with a solution that
doesn't allow people to abuse it?

And I'm not saying follow the desires of the member companies. I'm
saying follow the needs of the users of the web and not the web
designers. Though I'm confident the web designers will thank you in
the end.

> (I do have issues with SVG, which seems to me to be simply Adobe's
> Flash (although they now own Flash), instead of allowing vector
> images.)

SVG similiarly lost my attention because of this.
 
> > of whom don't have a voice here. I hear everyday from people about the
> > annoyances of the web and when I don't hear it, I see it. And you're
> > saying it's too entrenched? I can't imagine a more strained argument
> > against progress.
> 
> Progress is a very loaded word.  The people who want to have total
> control of the "user experience" see moves in that direction as
> progress, whereas I see them as regression to the state of things
> before the web, when there were tools like PDF and various sales
> presentation software packages.

It is loaded and I chose it because of it. I see CSS as moving towards
giving more control over the UI to the web designers and a move away
from control by the user.

HTML/CSS/Javascript applications are a pull away from the control by
the user. Control is being slowly rewritten back one web application
at a time. HTTP was designed not for stated application, but for
stateless documents. HTML was originally made as document language,
but is migrating to an application language.

The sad part to me is I see the W3C as respecifying large parts of
Operating Systems. They're specifying data models, user interface
guidelines, control types, preference systems, user management and so
on. We've someone gotten behind the idea that it should be the W3C and
not the OS makers responsible for designing large parts of operating
systems. And the end result is that I've lost much of what I had
already gained. Microsoft and Apple had done an amazing amount of work
on user interface design which doesn't matter when it's the guy at
blahblahblah.com doing the UI work. We gained a system that handled
nicely users who were blind, color blind and had manual dexterity
issues and now its gone because the guy at blah.com doesn't care.

We've moved the work of creating good UI's from the few major players
(Unix, Linux, Windows, Apple) and moved to the millions of web
designers so instead of 4 groups trying to progress their design, we
have millions of people. And each of those millions is basically
starting from scratch.

We lost drag/drop in the early days so it had to be added back and it
still isn't there really. We lost accessible design, which isn't
really being added back. We lost file explorers for dealing with our
files and so I can only organize now what's local, and not all the
things out there. We've lost so much and all I hear is, well we just
need to progress some more.

So I say let the web be about sharing content and not applications.
It's easier to do it since content is easier to develop than
applications are. Let the operating be responsible for integrating the
content and managing it. Let's not reinvent the wheel, the
transmission, the fuel injector or whatever else comes to mind.

> > that if you turn off CSS, they stop working. Not all, but a lot. There
> > are even more websites that stop working if you turn off Javascript.
> 
> There is, unfortunately, a significant lobby even in the accessibility
> industry to allow scripting only sites; Section 508 is fairly permissive
> on scripting.

-- 

Orion Adrian

Received on Wednesday, 3 August 2005 21:24:34 UTC