Re: lynx-dev Whither Standards? (was Re: New <BR> collapsing patch)

[Al Gilman]

to follow up on what Mike Castle said:

> Amazingly enough Michael Warner said:
> > hoops to get acceptable cross-browser appearance for their pages.
>                                         ^^^^^^^^^^
> 
> Isn't this exactly what the whole problem is?
> 
> That they are more concerned about appearance rather than structure?

If you put that statement 1-1 with "the problem" you will remain
frozen in frustration, because that is a piece of reality that
you aren't going to be able to change.

Fortunately, the situation is not so simple as that, and there
are things we can change which will make things better.  Maybe
you won't feel that things have been made "right," but more of
the information on the web will be usable by more of the people
on the web.

I have been sufficiently indoctrinated in the code-learning canon
of classical scholarship so that in my gut, I feel the
contemporary shift of emplasis more to appearance and style is
"wrong."

OTOH yesterday I took the metro downtown for an errand, and spent
a half an hour walking around the city.  Soaking up the rich
people-watching opportunities this affords, I must confess that I
was making judgements based on appearance a mile a minute.

Appearance matters, as well as orthograpy --> lexicography
etc. matters.  What you said is partly definable by spelling,
dictionaries, grammar, etc.  But what you communicate is also
partly defined by how you said it, which in a visual context
involves fonts, layout, and the whole nine yards.

If we can't come up with a platform of Web document
representation that accomodates people's concern for appearance,
the communication traffic will go elsewhere and the blind
internet users who _could have read the text if it were in HTML_
will be among the losers.

So no, it's not "exactly the whole problem."  It's not even a
circumstance the WAI is targeting as a problem.  The fact that
the textual wholeness of web pages gets ignored and unwittingly
left broken is a problem the WAI _is_ targetting.  If people care
more about the GUI appearance than how it sounds in the screen
reader, who cares?  Just so long as they care enough about how it
sounds in the screen reader to make it work there.

Most of the improvement will come from people putting pages on
the web who a) didn't know their pages were broken and b) didn't
know that they could do something about it.

I don't mean to pound you, Mike.  I really think that Web-base
option setting will be a great step forward.  Once we have URLs
for the option screens we can start cross-linking them with more
lengthy discussions in the Help pages and we begin to have a
dummie-ready system.

I just need to yell this speech a couple times for practice so
then I can say it in soothing, pleasing tones if I need to call
the WAI back from flirtations with left-brain intolerance (which
is no more noble than right-brain intolerance).

Al