Re: Fw: Disturbing trend in tables

>> easy (at least for an automated tool).  Happily, there is a very high
>> correlation between accessibility and validity (at least with HTML 4 and
>> latter), so I would gladly settle for that.

> Unfortunately, I think the correlation is because people who care about
> validity tend to care about accessibility.  Whilst it will make it
> easier to write non-visual automated tools and may just make the 
> developer's marketing people think about the real nature of HTML, I
> don't think that machine generated valid HTML will correlate as strongly
> as valid HTML generated because the user knows how to do it.

IMHO, the link (ahem, correlation) between validity and accessibility has
been grossly under appreciated by this (and other) groups.  In my
experience, the learned people who care about accessibility tend to care
about validity.  On the other hand, many of the folks who primarily care
about validity (there seem to fewer of them) achieve accessibility seemingly
by accident.  If this were not _something_ of a relationship, it would be
possible to find pages which were valid, but inaccessible.  It is trivially
easy to find sites which are reasonably accessible but not valid.  Why isn't
the reverse true?  Unless you are proposing that ALL people who care about
validity also care about accessibility, which seems terribly presumptuous!

In any case, it would be quite a worthy experiment, I would think, to test
this theory.  Does anyone know of any body or organization (government or
private) that requires validity?

Received on Monday, 22 January 2001 08:57:27 UTC