Do we really care about levels?

Daniel W. Connolly (connolly@hal.com)
Sun, 25 Sep 94 11:56:17 EDT

In message <199409241753.KAA17065@rock>, Terry Allen writes:
> I like the explanation that the html-0.dtd tells authors
> what they ought to do to reach all audiences through
> all interfaces, but then this is really a DTD for writers,
> and not for use by browser developers seeking to develop
> Level 0 compliance---what does it mean to tell them that
> they can count on ALT being there (it's REQUIRED, after
> all) when they really can't? anyway ...

The alternative is to take IMG out of level 0. I suppose that matches
current practice, in that folks that want to reach text-based
consumers actually maintain separate document trees.

Hmmm... this is exactly the kind of thing I want to be able to
automate. Currently, the Commercenet stuff says "Click _here_ for a
text-based version of our documents." Their server should be
_able_ to detect the capapilities of the browser and deliver
appropriate documents, without the intervention of the user. That's
the whole point of format negociation.

This is really getting nasty: what level of browser in lynx? It does
forms and highlighting, but it doesn't do images. This suggests that in
stead of:

Accept: text/html; level=2

the more appropriate design is:

Accept: text/html; highlighting=yes; forms=yes; images=no

This starts to look like more cost than benefits. Hmmm...

So how do we gracefully deploy changes in HTML?

Dan