Re: Tables for layout

At 11:13 AM 7/2/2001 , Joanne Barrett wrote:
>I was hoping that in order to improve our accessibility standards we could migrate to CSS and use this for positioning but I am being told that older versions of Netscape still do not support this.  I am now worried about going this route since 75% of our campus is using Netscape 4!  Does anyone have any suggestions, has anyone managed to work through this problem?

Tables for layout, while not explicitly "good", can be made "not bad"
pretty easily.  CSS-P (the positioning aspects of CSS2) is still rather
unreliable these days, while most assistive technology and non-graphical
browsers have learned to cope with tables used for layout.

This means that it's generally somewhat "safe" to use layout tables,
vs. using CSS-P.  There are some issues common to both, though, most
obviously that you need to make sure your page is comprehensible 
when tables and/or CSS-P are not available in the browser.

Given that layout tables are a relatively known quantity to modern
browsers and AT, and that CSS-P is a highly variable unknown in nearly
any case, I would suggest going with layout tables, as long as you make
them "not bad" as described in WCAG 1.0.

--Kynn

--
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@reef.com>
Technical Developer Liaison
Reef North America
Accessibility - W3C - Integrator Network
Tel +1 949-567-7006
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Received on Monday, 2 July 2001 11:34:33 UTC