[thelist] RE: The need for IE-only sites?

Tim Beadle tim.beadle at iop.org
Thu Jul 8 10:03:16 CDT 2004


On Thu, 2004-07-08 at 14:55, chris at martiantechnologies.com wrote:
> Our customers are not [disabled], and [to address a point you raised in
> a previous post] standards compliant code does not always render faster
> than non standards compliant code. Hence, the net improvement to the
> customer is zero.

Alright - maybe not render. But download (vs tag soup, which I know
we're not comparing against here) is faster.

> You can put a gun to my head and make me produce accessible code, but
> you can't make me care about it one way or the other.

Why not? Doesn't everyone have a right to access to information? Why
doesn't accessibility bother you?

> Anything I produce myself I'll make cross-browser, accessible and
> I'll make it validate to W3C standards. This gives me an internal glow,
> and increases my knowledge base.

Fair enough.

> Anything I produce at work I have to make a business case for.
> Converting existing systems doesn't have a business case in the short
> term, and that's all that management usually care about.

Agreed - as I said before, it's a slow process. I'm not expecting you to
make standards-compliance a top priority. I might, though, expect you to
move towards it slowly, cleaning up sites as they are improved or
features added.

> "Section 508 requires that Federal agencies' electronic and information technology is accessible to people with disabilities."
> --http://section508.gov/
> 
> Bearing in mind I'm not even in the country that produced Section 508
> let alone anything to do with its federal authorities, this has no
> relevance to me at all :)

Yes - it is US-centric. But to write it off as irrelevant? Naive _in
excelsis_. The principles contained within the presentation still apply,
wherever you live, whether there is relevant legislation in your country
or not.

Tim
-- 
Tim Beadle <tim.beadle at iop.org>




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