Re: [MACCAWS] Dogma W4

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

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