Re: XHTML 1.1: Marquee invalid

On Mon, 17 Jan 2005, Andreas Kirsch wrote:

> i have a problem with xhtml 1.1. i use a marquee tag in the html document
> and i know it's invalid.

It's invalid according to _all_ published HTML specifications, not just
XHTML 1.1 (which is actually an exercise in futility - use HTML 4.01
unless you are really playing with XML, in which case XHTML 1.0 is OK).

> is there any way to validate my document
> with marquee or another tag???

There is no counterpart to marquee in HTML specifications, or in CSS
specifications. Either leave it out, or admit that your markup is not
valid (or validate against a customized DTD, in which case your document
could be a valid SGML or XML document, though not a conforming HTML or
XHTML document).

> this part is invalid:
>
> <marquee onmouseover="this.scrollamount='1'"
> onmouseout="this.scrollamount='5'">
>  here the content
> </marquee>

Replace the <marquee> markup by something valid and appropriate, such as
<p> or <div> markup. You might include a class attribute for the purpose
of adding some styling in CSS to make the text appear prominently,
if that's what you are aiming at.

> because i want the wai-aaa wcag 1.0.

There is no page that really complies with WCAG 1.0 AAA rules.
But how does this relate to validation? The WAI rules say that you should
use valid markup, yes. But that's really not the key issue here; the
marquee _functionality_ is against accessibility - and specifically
violates the WCAG 1.0 rule that says that automatic movement should not
appear unless it is controllable by the user. (If the scrolling speed can
be changed by the user, by swapping between two values, when JavaScript is
enabled, and assuming the user knows about this feature, it doesn't mean
the element's behavior is controllable by the user, in the accessibility
sense.)

-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Monday, 17 January 2005 13:42:51 UTC