On 29/12/08 14:21, David Poehlman wrote:
and they wouldn't experience the problems in mac os if tey used coco and
devellopped according to the accessibility api.
Mozilla does use Cocoa. Here's a blog post discussing its use of Cocoa
by Mozilla developer Josh Aas:
http://boomswaggerboom.wordpress.com/2008/06/10/firefox-3-for-mac-os-x-under-the-hood/
Mozilla are also trying to use the accessibility API, to which the work
and problems previously cited is evidence.
So this statement is demonstrably false.
Perhaps you mean Mozilla should be using bog-standard Aqua controls. But
the blog post above also happens to explain how this is (a) not what
other browsers (including Safari) do and (b) why it's not feasible for a
browser to do. It's worth quoting at length:
"We do not use actual Cocoa buttons or any other Cocoa controls within
any Gecko 1.9 windows. The context menus, dropdown menus, the toolbar,
the search bar, the buttons and text fields within web pages - they are
not actual Cocoa controls. For example, instead of using actual Cocoa
buttons for “Submit” buttons we just draw the image of an Aqua “Submit”
button into an NSView, one of the basic Cocoa objects we use. Gecko 1.9
has Aqua form controls because we now draw images of Aqua form controls
when appropriate, not because we use actual Cocoa controls. The reason
we don’t use actual Cocoa controls isn’t because we are lazy or we can’t
figure out how to use them or because we are constrained by our
cross-platform requirements - Apple’s WebKit doesn’t use actual Cocoa
controls for things like “Submit” buttons or popup buttons in web pages
either, at least not the last time I checked. IE for Windows is in the
same boat. The reason Gecko 1.9 doesn’t use Cocoa controls is for the
sake of flexibility - form control behavior and appearance can be
changed significantly via HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Actual Cocoa
controls are simply not flexible enough to do all of the things that
people want to be able to do with controls on the web."
Compare this similar discussion from a WebKit developer:
http://webkit.org/blog/17/the-new-form-controls-checkbox-2/
Also, it's hard to see how adopting native form controls would fix the
critical performance problems Håkan Waara was asking for aid with:
http://lists.apple.com/archives/accessibility-dev/2006/Oct/msg00005.html
You keep talking about
features and cross platform accessibility but from where I sit, a
browser is a browser and if Apple can make one accessible on the Mac and
opera can make one accessible on the mac, mozilla can.
Mozilla might be able to make _a_ browser that is accessible to
VoiceOver; but the question is how they can make Firefox accessible.
These browsers differ from each other in codebase, featureset, user
interface, and politics, so it's illogical to conclude that what is easy
for developers of one is equally easy for developers of another.
Firefox is an open source project that belongs to the world. If you
believe you can make it accessible on Mac OS X and that it would be
worth making it accessible, you can contribute code to fix the
outstanding issues. If you think the accessibility implementation needs
to be done differently, you can again volunteer to do that. If you don't
know how to do that (and I certainly don't) or don't want to try, it
might be wise to have a least a little bit more trust in the developers
who have actually tried to do so, found it problematic, raised blocking
issues, and asked for help.
The situation with Mozilla is very different from (for example) the
situation with Adobe Flash Player, where the vendor has an explicit
policy of not developing accessibility support on Mac OS X, i.e. no
attempt has been made.
It's hard to draw productive lessons from Opera's success, because
there's so little information about how it was accomplished, either
technically or socially, whereas we at least know that their Windows
accessibility implementation drew help from IBM, Mozilla (in the person
of Aaron Leventha), and GW-Micro:
http://my.opera.com/chaals/blog/2007/09/04/a-new-baby-kestrel
--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
