On Wed, Mar 22, 2000 at 11:07:36PM -0800, Blu3Viper wrote:
> On Wed, 22 Mar 2000, Steve Dodd wrote:
> > Our servers get a lot of hits from academic sites and I think I've seen one
> > or two over the last 12 months. You're right, it's probably not significant
> > for companies. For institutions like say, government departments, I'd expect
> > them to make the effort, however.
>
> I don't.
Government departments' comms people are - or should be - in the business of
disseminating information. I don't see any situations where text wouldn't be
appropriate - though sometimes as well as rather than instead of some other
representation. HTML is a *mark up* language, don't forget.
> 5 years of internet time is likened to 50 years elsewhere.
I'm sorry, I don't buy any of this "internet time" stuff. I could heave a
brick from here and hit about 50 machines running Netscape 3.x (which
I believe is about 5 years old, if not more).
> You
> don't see hitching posts everywhere in town even though 1 or 2 people still
> ride horses nor do you have partyline telephone support in your corporate
> office on the off chance that a company will move in that has party line
> ringer telephones.
(I don't understand that second analogy, I guess it's US specific). It's a
question of who you want and need to support. Maybe if you're an "e-business"
(urgh) a smaller proportion of your potential clients will be using older
software, as they presumably access your site from home. Clients in bigger
institutions with managed IT facilities, or scarce resources (e.g.
universities, schools in this country) won't "upgrade" as fast. And I wouldn't
assume that, because you don't see significant numbers of older client in your
server logs, they're not out there: if your site isn't accessible, they'll
have stopped coming to you (a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy). And then
there's a question of client type. I don't think we'll be seeing shockwave /
flash support in mobile 'phones for a while. In an ideal world, the WAP people
wouldn't have had to come up with WML..
> > Eww! Is writing HTML that gracefully degrades so difficult? If your HTML
> > can't viewed on a 5 year old browser, what's going to happen when it's viewed
> > with, say, a screen reader?
>
> A website built for multimedia is built for multimedia, you simply can't
> express your content in textual fashion to the reader.
Sure you can. You may not be able to do it with the same version of the
resource though. Content negotiation in HTTP[0], the alt/title/longdesc
attributes and OBJECT element in HTML allow graceful degradation.
> Screen readers need to evolve.
How the hell is a screen reader supposed to interpret e.g. pages constructed
entirely of (maybe animated) images with no alternative text? Or a shockwave/
flash object?
> This is like expecting a jack in all your movie seats for the
> possible blind person and hiring someone to tell them what's happening
> onscreen.
... or expecting ramps to allow wheelchair access to buildings? I believe
that's a legal requirement for many institutions over here, and it's the same
principle. Even if you wish to disregard the needs of particular sorts of
people, the whole issue of machine interpretable information comes up (think
search engines, automated translation, ..) - why do you think there's so much
hype about XML?
Obviously if you're a business, it needs to make sense from a cost point of
view. Unfortunately, I could count on the fingers of one nostril the number
of businesses I know that do any useful research into the capabilities of
their "audience"..
[0] Though clients don't seem to make as much use of it as I'd like.
--
"If you wish to insult me my consulting rates are available by return of
email." -- Alan Cox
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