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RE: MAILTO: element

for

From: John Foliot - bytown internet
Date: Mar 11, 2002 2:50PM

Hey Kynn,

As I suspected, but I threw it out for discussion anyway. A while back
there was a thread about some US govenmental weenie "insisting" on some
bizare interpretations of Section 508 stuff (acording to this guy even
layout tables HAD to have Summaries!), and here in Canada (as you know)
Priority 2 is now mandated for government web sites. The W3C Guidelines can
be vague some times (what _is_ flicker? - 508 is more precise here), and
thus open to equally bizarro interpretations. I was just checking to see if
anybody had encounterd this. I also ran it by Chuck Letourneau directly
(whom I believe you know, I do some stuff with him occaisonally), and he
mentioned that it had not come up for discussion during the initial drafting
of the WAI guidelines at the W3C. He concurs that it falls under the
"anticipated" behaviour heading.

I would argue one of your points however, in that the current crop of
*major* popular browsers (user agents) do not allow this type of
configuration... they automatically "pop up" a new window and the user has
but 2 choices, follow the link (and create the pop-up) or not to follow the
link (however they CAN copy and paste to another application...). In either
case however, "..user agents {DO NOT YET} allow users to turn off spawned
windows" in this instance, so it was a valid question no?

Anyway, just some mental chewing gum to think about and discuss.

Cheers!

JF



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kynn Bartlett [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ]
> Sent: March 11, 2002 4:04 PM
> To: <EMAIL REMOVED> ; WebAIM forum
> Subject: Re: MAILTO: element
>
>
> At 11:35 AM -0500 3/11/02, John Foliot - bytown internet wrote:
> >Situation: WAI Priority 2 - 10.1 states: Until user agents allow users to
> >turn off spawned windows, do not cause pop-ups or other windows to appear
> >and do not change the current window without informing the user.
> >Question: Would not the <_a href="mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> "></a>
> code create
> >a pop-up window? In the major browsers it launches the associated email
> >client (Outlook, Outlook Express, Netscape Messanger, etc.) in a seperate
> >"window". One could argue that this is "anticipated" behaviour
> and is not
> >an accessibility issue per-se, but I'm curious about this and
> would like to
> >poll the group.
>
> Nope, it's not meant to apply to that. The author can't control the
> mailto link and doesn't necessarily create a pop-up window. The action
> of the link is entirely up to the user agent, and that's up to the
> browser to work out, and can be configured as per the user's request.
>
> Mailto links aren't an accessibility problem.
>
> --Kynn
>
> --
> Kynn Bartlett < <EMAIL REMOVED> > http://kynn.com
> Chief Technologist, Idyll Mountain http://idyllmtn.com
> Web Accessibility Expert-for-hire http://kynn.com/resume
> Next Book: Teach Yourself CSS in 24 http://cssin24hours.com
>
>
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