On Apr 6, 2005, at 8:45 PM, Robert Sayre wrote:
Yes, because the WG has *never* voiced an opinion in favor of that constraint,You are incorrect. There was an extended discussion, with Mark Pilgrim steadfastly refusing to let the hideous old multipart/alternate go until we had another proposal that had a good accessibility story.
I'm very familiar with that discussion, because I am the one who took the time to work through it, by parrying something like 20 insults.
I'm sorry; Paul and I waded through the WG email in detail and issued a detailed consensus call and got no significant push-back and the results went into the draft.
The list traffic around that shows a clear lack of consensus on this very topic, with many folks making the never-explained assertion that an entry without content or summary is somehow less-accessible to some group of people.
Actually, the argument was that if the content is either non-textual or remote, a summary is beneficial to accessibility. I agree that many people made this argument, sufficient in the co-chairs' minds to establish rough consensus.
A flurry of Paces has been filed. That's good. In my opinion, none of them are very material to the kind of content we're seeking from the broader IETF community, and it is appropriate at this time to seek that commentary with the draft we have now (modulo our AD's issues), which I have no problem in asserting enjoys rough-consensus support. Once that has launched, we'll figure out an orderly way to set up a discussion on the Paces from the last week. -Tim
