Re: [WSG] web accessibility-some thoughts

[Tim]

I should have said that laws apply to new kids on the block in theory.

The Australian 1992 Disability Discrimination Act is a fairytale. 
Australian Law is Absolute fiction and un-enforced.
State laws like Victorian standards are laughable. For example, 
Victorian Premier Bracks website,  has a contempt for standards and the 
Premier has a censorsship approach to criticism. We don't even have a 
Westminster democracy in Victoria, web standards are completely 
irrevelant to the government.


http://www.hereticpress.com/Dogstar/Publishing/AustWeb.html#Bracks

Try making a complaint to HREOC about any Aust gov website, I have. You 
will get no-where.
HREOC will ask AGIMO for advice and AGIMO will say that any government 
site is "near enough".
But Gary Nairn special minister of state said "Australia is a leader in 
e-government" Rubbish.


Only in the UK it seems there is some action for standards compliance 
mainly from the RNIB or maybe the Target case in the USA.


So in theory laws only apply to new kids on the block in the UK and 
maybe large corporations in the USA


In practice US and Australian laws are platitudes.

Tim




On 10/03/2007, at 12:55 AM, Raena Jackson Armitage wrote:


On 3/9/07, Tim <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

I hope you're not thinking of Australian law, Tim.

For example, televison broadcasters in Australia are in fact required 
to caption and had to *apply for* an exemption from liability on the 
proviso that they improve it.


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The Editor
Heretic Press
http://www.hereticpress.com
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Re: [WSG] standards selling points

[Joseph R. B. Taylor]

This is a discussion that continuously reappears on this list.

I've been down this path myself and these days agree with those who say 
not to bother selling the standards to people.  They really don't care. 
Sorry.  I spent many meetings with clients trying to explain what 
standards are, and the only thing they are interested in are any 
tangible benefits.  If you cannot focus on benefits, don't waste your time.


In my experience:

Clients do care about SEO, but don't care about screen readers. 
Clients do care that google can whip through clean code, butt don't care 
to know what tag soup is. 
Clients think that it interesting that javascript image buttons with 
"javascript:" in the url screw up search engines etc, but don't care for 
the technical explanation.
Clients don't care that the 25 nested tables don't validate, but do care 
that it takes 5 times as long to make a minor change on that type of page.
Clients think its cool when I press CTRL+SHIFT+S in firefox and remove 
the presentation layer to show them what the search engine sees, but 
they don't care to learn the difference between presentation, 
information and behavior.


As a designer/developer you want to try and separate your self from your 
competition, especially if they do crappy work.  A long speech aimed at 
educating the client is a nice thought but in practicality a waste of 
the client's time.


Point being, we're not selling standards here.  We're supposed to be 
selling quality websites that are well-coded and accessible to a variety 
of audiences.  Following standards is simply the recommended way to do 
so.  Save the education for a brochure to hand them if you insist on 
drilling the concept into their heads.


Keep in mind I'm in America so I'm in an environment where REALLY no one 
cares.  My competition all uses Frontpage, frames, javascript links, 
whole pages that are just jpgs with image maps, only use CSS to style 
scrollbars - its ridiculous!


My 2 cents,

*Joseph R. B. Taylor*
Sites by Joe, LLC
/Custom Web Design & Development/
Phone: (609) 335-3076
www.sitesbyjoe.com 



Tony Crockford wrote:

kevin mcmonagle wrote:


Hello,
This has been discussed before but i was wondering about new input.
I've tendered on a big job and i will be up against a lot of 
competition.
What are some web standards selling points that might get through to 
a completely uniformed, unsavy client.


MACCAWS was ahead of its time and seems to have been forgotten, mores 
the pity, but it was set up specifically to help web designers in your 
position.


There's a whole Kit of information here:

http://www.maccaws.org/kit/
Making A Commercial Case for Adopting Web Standards | maccaws.org

hth



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Re: [WSG] Talking about tabular data...

[Paul Novitski]

At 3/9/2007 06:05 AM, Nick Fitzsimons wrote:

On 8 Mar 2007, at 19:09:52, Paul Novitski wrote:


The HTML spec makes it explicitly clear that the relationship
between term and description can be interpreted more broadly than
merely terms and their definitions:

"Another application of DL, for example, is for marking up
dialogues, with each DT naming a speaker, and each DD containing
his or her words." [1]

In a dialog, the speech does not define the speaker; rather, they
mutually inform one another to constitute a data record of closely
associated fields.  I suggest that the DT/DD relationship is
similar to the TH/TD relationship of "head" and "datum."


In my view, the spec is far from clear at that point: it states that
it is a definition list, explains how it is to be used to mark up
terms and their definitions, and then suddenly turns around and gives
us carte blanche to do pretty much anything we like with it. Note
that this is mentioned as being "for example", so should IMHO be
considered informative, not normative. In terms of the semantics of
"term" and "definition", it makes no sense at all.



That's right -- in order to make sense of the spec it's necessary to 
expand your thinking beyond "term definitions" literally to include 
other metaphorically similar data relationships.




Also note that this "example"


Your use of quotation marks implies that you don't consider the 
example provided in the HTML spec to be a real example.  How so?  It 
looks like an example, it smells like an example, and they use the 
expression "for example" when they give the example.  How is it not 
an example?  Or do your quotes mean that you are so resistant to the 
ramifications of accepting the example that you are denying that it 
really is an example?  Would you have us believe that it is some 
other type of information masquerading as an example?


I don't take the spec so literally that I assume the authors intended 
DLs appropriate for dictionaries and dialog only.  I take the dialog 
example as explicit permission to regard the DL structure 
metaphorically and not restrict the usage to term definitions 
only.  They use the term "description" as well as "definition," 
another hint that we might think -- if not outside the box -- at 
least inside of a larger box than "term" and "definition" by 
themselves would indicate.




 is not present in the current XHTML 2.0
Working Draft, which might reasonably be assumed to seek to clarify
those areas of previous standards which have been found to be less
than perfect expressions of the intent of the authors.


It's interesting to speculate that the original authors somehow wrote 
the dialog example accidentally in contradiction to their own 
intent.  Considering how much attention those documents receive from 
so many people, I find it much more likely that the example given 
fully expressed their consensus, and that the group of people working 
on the XHTML 2.0 spec have, presumably, come to different conclusions 
or at least have taken a more conservative approach to their own spec.




As Jukka K. Korpela commented about this matter on the W3C's www-html
list a couple of years ago, they name it a duck, and then say it can
be used as a cow: "Another application of a duck is for milking..." [1]


I'm an admirer of Jukka's colorful writing but I don't find the two 
usages (dictionary and dialog) as different as duck and cow.  Rather 
than thinking that the spec "suddenly turns around and gives us carte 
blanche to do pretty much anything we like with it," I find the 
dialog example still remains within fairly clear bounds: a 
relationship of duality in which the term specifies the thing and the 
description provides some information about it.  This pattern of 
duality is not mimicked by any other HTML structure I can think of 
off-hand except TH/TD table cell types, and I find it useful when 
marking up certain kinds of information.


May I ask, do you use DL for anything other than dictionaries and 
glossaries in which terms are being defined?  How broad is your 
application of the structure?  What HTML markup would you choose for a dialog?


What about a thumbnail gallery?  Can you accept that an image could 
be a term and its caption the description or vice versa?  Or a 
catalog with the title, author, ISBN, cover image, blurb, etc. as, 
variously, terms and descriptions?  What else?


If we are willing to apply DL not just to dictionaries but also to 
other structures that metaphorically resemble dictionaries, the 
question remains where we draw the boundaries around that usage.


With such a sparse semantic landscape as HTML provides, I resist the 
effort to confine DLs to dictionaries alone.  I want to take 
advantage of its structural properties to make my markup more 
semantically meaningful and less tag soupy.


Regards,

Paul
__

Paul Novitski
Juniper Webcraft Ltd.
http://juniperwebcraft.com 




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Re: [WSG] web accessibility-some thoughts

[Raena Jackson Armitage]

On 3/9/07, Tim <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:


The Accepted old media grandfather clause, only applies to new kids.



I hope you're not thinking of Australian law, Tim.

For example, televison broadcasters in Australia are in fact required to
caption and had to *apply for* an exemption from liability on the proviso
that they improve it.


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Re: [WSG] Talking about tabular data...

[Nick Fitzsimons]

On 8 Mar 2007, at 19:09:52, Paul Novitski wrote:

The HTML spec makes it explicitly clear that the relationship  
between term and description can be interpreted more broadly than  
merely terms and their definitions:


"Another application of DL, for example, is for marking up  
dialogues, with each DT naming a speaker, and each DD containing  
his or her words." [1]


In a dialog, the speech does not define the speaker; rather, they  
mutually inform one another to constitute a data record of closely  
associated fields.  I suggest that the DT/DD relationship is  
similar to the TH/TD relationship of "head" and "datum."


In my view, the spec is far from clear at that point: it states that  
it is a definition list, explains how it is to be used to mark up  
terms and their definitions, and then suddenly turns around and gives  
us carte blanche to do pretty much anything we like with it. Note  
that this is mentioned as being "for example", so should IMHO be  
considered informative, not normative. In terms of the semantics of  
"term" and "definition", it makes no sense at all.


Also note that this "example" is not present in the current XHTML 2.0  
Working Draft, which might reasonably be assumed to seek to clarify  
those areas of previous standards which have been found to be less  
than perfect expressions of the intent of the authors.


As Jukka K. Korpela commented about this matter on the W3C's www-html  
list a couple of years ago, they name it a duck, and then say it can  
be used as a cow: "Another application of a duck is for milking..." [1]


Regards,

Nick.

[1] 
--
Nick Fitzsimons
http://www.nickfitz.co.uk/





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