[Foundation-l] site notice not accessible to users with disabilities

[Brion Vibber]

[snip]

As we've told you several times, we've made a deliberate trade-off choice.

1) The sitenotice is **not required** to use or operate the site; it's 
an extra. As such, not seeing it in an unsupported browser doesn't 
interfere with your ability to use the site -- this is called "graceful 
degradation" and is a web best practice.

2) Using JavaScript includes to maintain the notice avoids problems with 
caching and search engines indexing a temporary notice text for a long 
period.

So far this is the best way to provide a dynamic notice to the majority 
of our visitors without causing problems for others. If you have 
technical suggestions for alternate implementations, they're welcome in 
a more relevant channel such as wikitech-l.

-- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)
CTO, Wikimedia Foundation
San Francisco