http://www.internetworld.com/print/current/point/20000315-underdev.html


March 15, 2000
UNDER DEVELOPMENT

The Good Side Of Regulation
The Americans With Disabilities Act Will Force Us To Use HTML The Way It
Was Intended
By - Nate Zelnick


More often than not, any turning point in technology--like any
significant historical event--is clear only in retrospect. And
determining whether events are net positive or negative can only be
determined when all of the ramifications have been explored. When Marc
Andreessen and the team at the National Center for Supercomputing
Applications snuck a simple element to add images into Mosaic--the
graphical browser that became the basis for Netscape Navigator and
Internet Explorer--it must have seemed like a minor thing. But the
unilateral creation of the IMG tag--against the wishes of the IETF's
HTML Working Group, which had hoped to find a more generic and
easier-to-implement binary object element--has cascaded into a true
disaster.


You could argue that adding graphics to the Web boosted it out of
academe and into commerce, but there are two problems with this minor
change that have been a constant brake on forward momentum. The Mosaic
team's decision to go with a kludged element syntax made the process of
building HTML parsing engines harder. But more significantly, the
decision opened a Pandora's Box of arbitrary HTML extensions that
sparked the Microsoft/Netscape arms race of proprietary tags that made
everybody's job more difficult, and more costly, today.


Groups like the Web Standards Project were formed ages ago to yell at
browser makers and explain why standards are vital. But I bring it up
again because we're quickly approaching an event that will make all the
ramifications of the Mosaic error much clearer. By the time you read
this, the federal government will have issued requirements for making
all government Web sites compliant with the Americans With Disabilities
Act. The Justice Department has already decided that Web sites aren't
exempt from the ADA and must provide a way to present data to visually
impaired users.


If you've ever browsed the Web using a text-to-speech converter, you
know that most Web pages parse as an endless repetition of the words
"Table" and "IMG," reflecting the desperate lengths designers go to in a
futile attempt to control page rendering. Bringing pages into ADA
compliance is going to rock a lot of boats, but it will also close the
standards gap that Mosaic opened.


Since the easiest way to make pages accessible will be to separate the
content of a page from how it is presented (which is how HTML was
designed to work), ADA compliance will also mean that delivering content
to cell phones, TVs, and other devices will simply mean putting a page
into the right format for the device when it's requested.


You'll hear a lot of whining from big Web sites. They'll say the cost of
compliance is too high and that it will kill e-commerce. That's
short-term rhetoric: When we look back at this change a few years hence,
we'll wonder why we didn't do this in the first place.


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