Patrick Lauke wrote:
Geoff Deering
It's actually the other way around, companies and organisation developing technologies are encourage to develop them according to W3C recommendations.
That still does not detract from the fact that the Flash format is not a W3C technology.
The UAAG applies to Flash. http://www.w3.org/WAI/UA/
True, but that does mean that the W3C is in a position to release a spec for the *format*.
I can't see what the point is. The W3C has no control over Java or many other technologies that are proprietry or closed, but that does not stop them from becoming or meeting W3C standards or compliance. But it is still a headache for us developers, because then we have to deal with plugins. It would be far better to be living in a world where the user agent run everything native; SVG, SMIL, etc. But how far are we from that?
One thing that gets my observation about watching discussions on lists like this, is not so much the education and learning of standards, which is enough to do as is, but the huge amount of time and investment in learning all the user agent bugs and gotchas. I just wonder, if we really had to cost our development time, how much of it is dealing with both authoring tool and user agent bugs?
And another thing, the effort developer put into dealing with this is not recipricated, in my view, by many of the companies producing the tools.
If you really want to chase up the current state of companies working with ATAG and UAAG it's best to ask Matt May (http://www.w3.org/People/Matt/), he's the guy working with these companies (last I checked).
Unfortunately, Mayy is leaving (or has already left) the W3C http://www.bestkungfu.com/archive/date/2005/04/quittin-time/
That's sad. He doen't say so, but I think a lot of them get W3C burnout trying to deal with those companies. They can't speak freely, but I suspect a lot of the companies have their token member on W3C working groups, where back at HQ the project manager really doesn't give it much priority.
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