Re: conflation of issues or convergence of interests?

On Tuesday 2007-07-31 08:39 +0200, Sander Tekelenburg wrote:
> At 21:17 -0700 UTC, on 2007-07-30, L. David Baron wrote:
> > On Tuesday 2007-07-31 05:25 +0200, Sander Tekelenburg wrote:
> 
> [... title="" to suppress @alt tooltips in a some specific UA]
> 
> >> How is that not an authoring error? It's not the author's job fix UA bugs.
> >
> > Web authors spend a significant portion of their time working around
> > UA bugs.  They want their page to be accessible to the portion of
> > their users with buggy browsers
> 
> I can't follow. Which definition of accessible are you using here?

Is there more than one that apply here?  "X is accessible to Y"
means "Y is able to access/use X".  I'm not limiting the term to
just accessibility to people with disabilities, though.

> >, just as they want their page to be
> > accessible to the portion who are blind, etc.
> 
> But in this particular example we're talking about an authoring trick that
> makes the page less accessible to blind (and other) users, aren't we?

How does it make the page less accessible to blind users?

> > This working group should be working on HTML in order to improve the
> > Web (for all participants, such as users, authors, and
> > implementors).  Therefore, when evaluating designs for new (or

> Making that concrete for this example, that means we need to kill @alt (would
> already be good to kill img anyway). Taking backwards compatibiity (pre-HTML5
> UAs) onto consideration, killing img and @alt can only be achieved by keeping
> them, but providing authors with something very clearly better. <object> is a
> potential candidate. It has some things going for it, but also some serious
> problems that would need to be solved first. If they cannot be solved, then
> something like the earlier suggested <picture> would seem be the only
> realistic option. (Well, at least I haven't seen any more realistic scenarios
> pop up yet.)

Why all these changes?  What do they improve?

-David

-- 
L. David Baron                                 http://dbaron.org/
Mozilla Corporation                       http://www.mozilla.com/