Font vs. Style sheets

Checkpoint 3.3 says

Use style sheets to control layout and presentation. [Priority 2]
  For example, use the CSS 'font' property instead of the HTML FONT element 
to contro  font styles.

This implies that we should not do the following

<H1> <font size="+1"  color="green">  The Gadfly </font> </H1>

I don't see any practical consequences of doing this. We're specifying the 
logical classification of the text via H1.  Screenreaders will ignore the 
font.  People with low vision can override the font.  So what's the 
harm?  I don't think we should rule out such cases.

There's just one problem I can think of, a bug in some versions of 
Navigator that don't fully override colors, even though there's a menu item 
to do that.  I've come across that in the past.  But at most, that means 
that you should precede this with "Until user agents fix bugs in allowing 
users to override font sizes and colors....".  And even then, do we know 
that style sheet override doesn't have bugs of it's own?  Plus, even though 
we have to worry about features that are just plain absent, I don't think 
we should worry too much about every bug in every browser or 
screenreader... the added complexity and just isn't worth it I think.


Len
-------
Leonard R. Kasday, Ph.D.
Institute on Disabilities/UAP, and
Department of Electrical Engineering
Temple University
423 Ritter Annex, Philadelphia, PA 19122

kasday@acm.org
http://astro.temple.edu/~kasday

(215) 204-2247 (voice)
(800) 750-7428 (TTY)

Received on Thursday, 24 February 2000 11:29:42 UTC