Who is hurt by current practices?
Anyone who slaps a "this page is best viewed with Browser X" label on a
Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web,
when you had very little chance of reading a document written on
another computer, another word processor, or another network.
[Tim Berners-Lee in Technology Review, July 1996]
Use of proprietary HTML coding that is hardware or software
specific can deprive seekers of information. The
ulitimate test of who might be hurt is to determine who the
audience is. If the documents under consideration are personal
vanity pages, it might be appropriate to use non standard HTML.
If the documents are intended for an Intranet in which the
software and hardware can be dictated and supplied, then
anything goes.
If the information is critical to the world it would be best to use the
simplest, most widely supported HTML.
Who is being left out?
Relying heavily on graphics and non-standard markup,
and not providing text/plain HTML alternatives
leaves out many users.
- Anyone using a plain DOS or UNIX connection that is text only
(there are lots of them about and there are bound to be more, as
old DOS machines are cheap and easily available and demand for access
to the information on the net is only bound to go up)
- Users who access the Net via public libraries,
universities and other text-only vehicles.
- A user who is sight impaired may be using a text to speech or text
to braille mechanism to use the internet.
- Many users have old modems, old hardware, and old software
(early Netscape, old AOL, Lynx, etc.)
- Even users with very fast connections travel with graphics off. People
trying to make purchasing decisions may be in a hurry.
- Users with handheld devices, such as the Apple Newton, and small
machines such as laptops, are severely limited by thoughtless markup.
Abigails WWW dream [1] is a fine
story that illustrates the power of the web as a resource that
must be accessible to everyone.
W3C's Pages on Disabilities[2]
[1]http://www.edbo.com/abigail/WWW/dream.htm
[2]http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Disabilities/
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