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Re: Illinois Functional Web Accessibility Evaluator/One Last Comment

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From: Jon Gunderson
Date: Jan 24, 2007 9:10PM

Character encoding issues are somewhat complex issues since there can be conflicting information provided by META tags and the HTTP headers. Many content developers may not control the web server settings for http headers and/or maybe unaware of how to set them.

Probably the most likely scenario for FAE is to only warn people if the META or XML tag is missing, since another potential source of author character encoding information is the XML tag in xhtml document:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en-US" lang="en-US">


Jon


---- Original message ----
>Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2007 17:29:45 -0500
>From: "Robert Yonaitis" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
>Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Illinois Functional Web Accessibility Evaluator/One Last Comment
>To: "WebAIM Discussion List" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
>Cc: Nick Hoyt < <EMAIL REMOVED> >, Dan Linder < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
>
>Jon:
>
>Might help the users and the people on the list.
>
>It would seem the method you are requiring is NOT the primary method
>mentioned by the validator
>
>
>Help for The W3C Markup Validation Service. Retrieved January
> 24, 2007, from W3C Web site: http://validator.w3.org/
> docs/help.html#faq-charset
>
>
>An HTML document should be served along with its character encoding.
>
>Specifying a character encoding is "typically done by the web server
>configuration," by the scripts that put together pages, and inside the
>document itself. IANA maintains the list of official names for character
>encodings (called charsets in this context). You can choose from a
>number of encodings, though we recommend UTF-8 as particularly useful.
>
>
>Cheers,
>rob
>
>
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
>[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Jon Gunderson
>Sent: Wednesday, January 24, 2007 5:00 PM
>To: WebAIM Discussion List
>Cc: Nick Hoyt; Dan Linder
>Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Illinois Functional Web Accessibility Evaluator:
>Sign up for free user acount
>
>Robert,
>I am going to discuss this issue with our developers and this maybe an
>area where we want to provide a warning. Our current requirement is
>based on what HTML validation tools want to validate content [1,2].
>
>I should also point out FAE [3] is designed to help people that are
>looking to do accessible design, rather than accessible repair. The
>tool is trying to direct people in making conscious accessible design
>decisions, not to try to fix content after it has already been designed.
>The result is that some of the tests will not be welcome to people who
>are just trying to fix up inaccessible designs.
>
>Jon
>
>1. W3C HTML Validation Service
>http://validator.w3.org
>
>2. Web Design Group Validtors
>http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/
>
>3. Functional Web Accessibility Evaluator http://fae.cita.uiuc.edu
>
>---- Original message ----
>>Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2007 08:18:40 -0500
>>From: "Robert Yonaitis" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
>>Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Illinois Functional Web Accessibility Evaluator:
>Sign up for free user acount
>>To: "WebAIM Discussion List" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
>>
>>Jon/All,
>>
>>Thanks for the clarification. So since we are using phrases like "In
>>General" and "the author is probably" should we not do what is done in
>>tons of validation suites and say WARNing, because something could
>>probably be wrong versus telling all developers to rewrite their code
>>which in cases could be rewriting an application? In the case of the
>>headers they are easily read and then perhaps a WARNing on that, maybe
>>some text,
>>
>>"Warning, Character Encoding Found in the HTTP header but not in the
>STATIC source and this may imply a problem might exist"
>>
>>This may be safer then having developers change their applications or
>dynamic code or even 1000's of static pages that admittedly could be
>done quickly if they decide is really required. By doing this the tool
>will have more value and be a aide to the developer and consultants
>doing any kind of testing.
>>
>>What do you think?
>>
>>Thanks,
>>Rob
>>
>>