In my view it depends on who you are and who is paying for the website development. If you are building a website for yourself, by all means spend as much time as you like learning about the new technologies and implementing them. However, if you are building a website for someone else, you should obtain their consent before spending more than is necessary to meet their needs. HTML4 and XHTML1.0 already meet most needs. At first it will take developers longer to build sites using HTML5 because they are less familiar with it, and the client should not have to pay for that if they are deriving no benefit. If you think there may be some unquantifiable benefit in the future, ask the client if they want to pay more now in order to reap that benefit. I am all for the advancement of accessibility but I feel that a lot of developers want to use these new technologies because they are cool and interesting, not because they provide better value for their clients. Steve
________________________________ From: li...@webstandardsgroup.org [mailto:li...@webstandardsgroup.org] On Behalf Of tee Sent: 27 January 2011 00:40 To: wsg@webstandardsgroup.org Subject: Re: [WSG] HTML5 v. HTML 4.x On Jan 26, 2011, at 1:34 PM, Steve Green wrote: To the best of my knowledge, all screen readers will 'accept' the new tags insofar as they will read the content between the tags. They just won't do anything with the tags themselves. On 1/25/11 12:34 AM, "Steve Green" <steve.gr...@testpartners.co.uk <x-msg://129/steve.gr...@testpartners.co.uk> > wrote: You can use it, but will anyone benefit from it? Assistive technologies don't support much, if any, of the new semantics. I don't know if search engines and other users of programmatic access to websites are currently able to make use of HTML5 markup, but I have not seen anything to indicate that they do. So what exactly is the benefit? So we don't progress but wait for the screen readers be ready so that we can all merrily hold hands marching forward? I am not sure this type of skepticism does any good to accessibility as a whole-I see it does more harm especially the majority of web community do not think building accessible site a de facto. It probably does more damage coming from well-recognized and respectable accessibility practitioners. How about advice such as "if the site needs to be compliant with DDA law, or if the majority users are of assistive devices, think carefully weight over all the pros and crons before jumping on HTML5 wagon"? There! I am listening. tee ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: memberh...@webstandardsgroup.org ******************************************************************* ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: memberh...@webstandardsgroup.org *******************************************************************
