The Good Side of Regulation: The Americans with Disabilities Act Will Force
Us to Use HTML The Way It Was Intended 
By: Nate Zelnick nzelnick@iw.com
From: Internet World - March 15, 2000 - page 90

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.  

http://www.internetworldnews.com/idx_article.asp?inc=031500/3.15UnderDev&issue=3.15