Re: More references on XML/XHTML and accessibility

On Friday, June 27, 2003, at 03:51 AM, tina@greytower.net wrote:
>   This, the entire debate, is important. It is important because of the
>   myths it is exposing *even on the WAIG IG* list.
>
>   I see us quite clearly moving into a situation in which more and more
>   people will write XHTML because "someone said it is accessible!",
>   sending it as text/html, and every browser there is error correcting
>   for the same, foolish, mistakes that are done with HTML today.

Indeed, I just encountered this on the XHTML-L list.  I asked about
this issue and someone well-meaning repeated exactly that -- "it's more
accessible than HTML!" -- but had no good reason why.  On the other
hand, Simon St. Laurent, someone whose knowledge of XHTML and XML I
respect, had this to say:

(Kynn wrote):
>> In that regard, both XHTML and HTML are equally accessible,
>> and you can get the same benefit by using HTML 4.01 Strict.
>
(Simon wrote):
> Yeah, I'm afraid so.
>
> It's slightly easier to write tools which test XHTML for accessibility
> because there's less messing with parsing, but that's not a huge step
> forward, at least in my mind.
>
> (And then there are nifty things like TagSoup which can coerce HTML to
> XHTML anyway:
> http://mercury.ccil.org/~cowan/XML/tagsoup
> )

The key is to make sure that everyone has the same understanding of
XHTML as Simon -- a difficult task, to be sure!

--
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com>                     http://kynn.com
Chief Technologist, Idyll Mountain                http://idyllmtn.com
Author, CSS in 24 Hours                       http://cssin24hours.com
Inland Anti-Empire Blog                      http://blog.kynn.com/iae
Shock & Awe Blog                           http://blog.kynn.com/shock

Received on Friday, 27 June 2003 10:31:10 UTC