Re: WA - background-image in CSS

Jim Ley wrote:

> There's has to be no information available in a purely decorative
> background image other than the url to the image itself, this is already
> provided by the page developer, and is fully available to all users if
> they want it given appopriate UA's.  The page developer has done all that
> is reasonable it seems to me.


The line between purely decorative and providing content is not always 
clear. Ineke's black and gray lined background is there to focus 
attention on the text, so it is not purely decorative. In fact, it is 
hard to imagine what "purely decorative" could mean, or why one would 
want such items on a well-designed page.

On my Vallarta real estate site, one might call the images of 
bikini-clad women "purely decorative," but believe me, the site would 
not convey the same information without them. They are very functional. 
The difficult part is deciding how that functionality can be conveyed 
using other media for other users.

I don't think it needs to be a one-to-one correspondence for such fuzzy 
issues, but the overall effect should be the same.

Charles F. Munat
Seattle, Washington

Received on Friday, 18 January 2002 14:04:27 UTC