Re: [MACCAWS] Dogma W4

--- Seth Foley <[email protected]> wrote:
> The DogmaW4 seems to be a nice effort, but I see it as overly
> centric
> on accessibility.  Jakob Nielsen, guru though he may be, has issued
> several rants from his digital pulpit -- the man advocates that
> logos
> can only appear in the upper-left corner, for instance -- and
> though I
> find myself sharing many of his ideals, I certainly differ in the
> execution.
> 
> Before I launch into my tirade, I'll provide a disclaimer.  My
> personal
> site validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict, the CSS as well, and I've
> tested it
> on a variety of platforms and people (including a totally
> colorblind
> friend running konqueror on an old distro of Debian Linux.)  By no
> means do I feel that standards are irrelevant.  But I digress.
> 
> While reading the Dogma, I found myself shaking my head much as I
> would
> when reading some of my professors' work.  They lived inside an
> ivory
> tower, their precious ideals and thoughts unsullied by outside
> corruption and influences.  Unfortunately, that also made most of
> their
> papers entirely laughable when read from a real-life perspective.
> 
> Dogma suffers from a similar malaise.
> 
> It is worthwhile to advocate the concepts of semantic markup,
> strict
> document conformance, and cross-platform compatibility.  It is
> equably
> laudable to promote accessibility at the cost of design.  It is
> not,
> however, responsible nor understandable for the authors to release
> a
> document that conflicts with standard practices, squashes design
> solely
> for a compliance icon, and mandates excessive description.
> 
> I won't say that I finished the Dogma.  I stopped reading near the
> end,
> around paragraph 8.7 -- the CSS rule for hyperlinks.  As a
> developer, I
> know that I must maintain a large amount of contrast on my personal
> site to be sure that links are clearly visible.  I make sure that
> they
> are well described by context.  And then the designer takes over.
> 
> I personally feel that underlining on a computer looks positively
> hideous.  Because so few web designers attempt to put in decent
> amounts
> of line spacing, the extra pixels of an underline only make the
> surrounding text more difficult to read.  Serif fonts may enhance
> legibility, but when there's an extra line cutting through the
> descenders of one line and merging with the ascenders of the next,
> nothing much is gained.  In fact, much is lost.
> 
> The writers of this document would have me believe that I've
> committed
> some sort of crime.  Have I?  No.  I've simply chosen another way
> to
> make my emphasis -- I use bold exclusively for linking.  Anyone
> with a
> screen reader will hear the anchor tags; anyone with vision can see
> the
> obvious differences between the links and the surrounding text.  If
> anything, I've drawn more attention to the links.
> 
> While I'm sure the authors of DogmaW4 had wonderful intentions,
> their
> advocacy goes far beyond necessity and, indeed, seems to verge upon
> zealotry.  Many of their recommendations are conflicting -- such as
> those statements which decree that text cannot be used in an image,
> later excepted (five paragraphs down) for the obvious problem of
> logotypes.
> 
> (Apparently, the authors haven't tried using WEFT or Netscape's
> similarly awful tool for font embedding.)
> 
> I'll stop ranting now.  I do not mean to be inflammatory, nor
> insulting, and I hope that no one takes my e-mail as such.  But I
> strenuously suggest that if any part of this document is excerpted
> for
> MACCAWS use, it be thoroughly reviewed before inclusion -- and I
> hope
> that any web developers reading it will similarly use a generous
> heap
> of salt.
> 
> Seth Foley
> sfoleyATravenworksDOTorg

I had been waiting for at least one other comment before I chimed in
myself. I think Seth has put it well. We've had quite a bit of
discussion about "grey areas" and validating pages and the like.

Keeping our goal in mind, (and no offense to the intended effort of
the authors of DW4) Maccaws has no use for such a stringent document.
I think that many of us would disagree with many points on the
document, I know that I did as well.

The likening to Jakob is a good one. Rest assured that the Research
team is hard at work on generating some recommendations for what we
believe is a good way to do things in view of our goal. Please be
patient with us, being a free .org people have real jobs, and this is
no small task.

For the authors, I say to them - your intentions are good, but I
don't know who in the real world will adhere to it.

Tom

=====
var me = tom.pixelmech.webDeveloper();

http://www.pixelmech.com/
http://www.maccaws.com/
[Making A Commercial Case for Adopting Web Standards]

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