On Fri, May 13, 2005 at 09:29:20PM +1000, Scott Barnes wrote: > hehe. > > I'm not an avid TABLE fan, but in most situations when presenting > "Applications" via HTML, tables just tend to be the norm. This goes > for UI... oh, and many who have seen my CSS ZEN can agree i've pushed > that envelope in making CSS work. I've got MossyBlog 2.0 making use of > pure CSS and it was a bastard of a thing to get thrown together at > times, mainly as i wanted to position content for search engine > optimisation (test some theories out). So it's code flow didn't > exactly follow what you see visually. > > That being said, i'm actually shocked that accessibility client/ware > technology disregards standards like XHTML completely - in that - > TABLES are considered verbose tags to be ignored? > > Surely they must take their logic from the inline DTD? and based on > that work out the semantics vs noise and adjust accordingly... > > I mean, ffs its bad enough browsers have issues and now someone here > states that accessibility clients have certain quirks also associated? > ... > > What's deemed accessible aswell is a site must have the same > experience as for a non-disabled vs disabled person, or they could > find themselves up for discrimination (or was it another legal buzz > word). > > Bah.. > > Too religious for my blood.
There are definite religious connotations, and perhaps I'm too much of a purist. I do like the thought that my semantic markup can later have other styling applied to it allowing it to be digested in ways that I did not have to plan for. I'm not sure which particular accessibility clients you're referring to, re: the quirks you mention (that'll teach me to skim conversations and shoot my mouth off anyway perhaps?) but for myself I tend to keep three groups - standard graphical browsers, text-only environments and voice/audio environments - in mind and have some blind hope that if the X/HTML I produce is sufficient for these, it is flexible enough for other applications. Unfortunately again the technology in common use is not necessarily in line with what can/could be done with flexible markup. I understand that the JAWS audio tool for vision impaired Windows users, for example, uses the IE rendering engine to decide what to read and in what order to read it, unfortunately applying styles meant for visual users, eg. the replacement of heading tags with images via stylesheet information. My purist response to this situation is that while table markup is used for layout purposes in a large proportion of publically available content it would be counter-intuitive for producers of this software to follow the recommended presentation - it would make much of the web -less- accessible to those who are unable to use a standard graphical browser than it already is. As producers of this content, we are in a position to change those proportions and to make it practical for the producers of such software to properly support the standards, insert chicken/egg scenario of your choice at this juncture. Maybe the same pressure would not go unnoticed by producers of A Particular Web Browser and they too would work at removing some of the quirks that make visual CSS layouts such a pain, or even towards supporting a larger subset of the CSS2 standard. Bah, it's Friday night, I'm home from the pub and I'm rabbiting on about web standards. Bed awaits. -T --- You are currently subscribed to cfaussie as: [email protected] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Aussie Macromedia Developers: http://lists.daemon.com.au/
