Hi, > > 1. The web has never been designed to give you exactly the > > same results everywhere. It has been designed to give the > > user the best possible access to the information independent > > from his eventual disabilities. Use the tool as it is and > > don't complain that your hammer is not a saw. > > I'm pretty sure the web in a couple years whould be the same but > the tools will drasticly change. Take a look and see what's > going on right now.
The web is the tool I am talking about. It is a tool for publishing. Another tool for publishing is e.g. a newspaper - each with their benefits and drawbacks. > > 2. If you still need exact visual reproduction of something, > > there is always flash. You can not have accessability and > > exact visual reproduction at the same time as much as you > > never can exactly measure position and momentum at the same time. > > That's the idea behind it. They like to change this in the future. > Isn't that a good idea? How could that be? How can you have exact visual representation for visualy handicaped persons? They need to use a huge font in order to be able to decipher anything. How can you have exact visual representation with an aural reader? Also think of reproduction on paper, a braile reader, etc. It is simply not possible. The web was (not perfectly, but basically) designed to be able to have the information available on every possible output. It is just eventually able to give you some controll over the visual presentation. That is nice and we should use it, but we should never depend on it. You can try to exactly measure position and momentum at the same time, but you will fail. You can also try to catch free energy travel faster than light, but you will fail. You can try to have exact visual presentation in an accessible way, but you will fail. > > 3. We have had a browser engine to rule them all, IE, but > > noone ever liked it. > > You just change the dictator but stay in domination. Having > > multiple browser engines gives the users back their freedom > > of choice. For web developers an designers it sometimes is a > > pita, but in the whole it is better to have a pita for some > > and freedom or all. > > I guess the idea behind the concept is to get a way to use > a specific rendering engine in different browsers. This means > the software we speak about is a piece of midleware which > runs in a browser of the users choice and is able to render the > visited page with the engine the developer decides to use. That means, the User needs to have a number of engines installed and run them in a shell which he calls browser and the developer decides which of the engines to use for the current page. Great. I need to install IE on Linux then, because there will be quite a number of pages that demand IE as their rendering engine. I also don't gain freedom of choice then. I can not choose to not install a specific engine and still use all Webpages. Nowadays I can install one or if I like fourtytwo (OK, we count varoius versions as well...) rendering engines and use (almost) all Webpages whith whatever engine I trust. There are also rendering engines that still have severe security problems. Even if I have one of them installed for testing reasons I don't whant the developer of a Website (who eventually is evil) to chose that engine for his Webpage whithout me beeing able to prevent it. > This would make the develeopers choose the rendering engine > and the user the browser. Isn't that freedom? No, sorry. The developer of a webpage should never be able to chose which software executes on the clients side, except inside the sandbox, the user may allow him, because if he is evil he will chose the choice that is the worst for the user from a security point of view. The user should not give the developer of any website controll over his machine. > This yould make us much more independent from the browser > companies and give us the prower we need. Only two of the major browser engines are developed by a single company each. That is IEs engine and Operas. Webkit is currently beeing returned to the kHTML team, kHTML is a comunity project and Gecko as well. I guess, I have all the major engines now. We do not depend on any company when it comes to browser engines, we as developers only depend on the users and which browser they install. Christof
