RE: CSS optimised for different browsers

>    From a personal, aestethic, point of view I find them unelegant. It
>   should really be unnecessary to, as one of them suggests, include a
>   text-string as part of a value for the voice-family 
> property which IE
>   reacts to and stops parsing. It smacks of GOTO.

I agree, most of them are inelegant and yes, it really should be unnecessary
to use them but we find ourselves in a switch-over period (it may turn out
to be a long switch-over period and this may be exacerbated with future css
standard). We are encouraged to use css for positioning and yet browser
vendors seem incapable/unwilling of writing to w3c specs. It wouldn't be so
bad if the non-compliant browsers had an insignificant market share but one
of the worst happens to be the dominant browser. 

Your practical argument seems to revolve around maintenance issues and I
agree that it's a headache. But, and this is the salient point, it is *my*
headache and what I do doesn't really affect accessibility as long as I keep
things up to date. If I want to write a huge site based entirely on static
html and update each page individually then I can and it isn't an
accessibility issue. Of course I would be insane to do so and it would be
much better to use includes and server-side scripting but the point is that
it isn't an accessibility issue. If you have any practical examples of where
css hacks have inhibited accessibility then I really would like to see them
because I use them a lot and would hate to think that something I was doing
was inadvertently affecting the accessibility of my pages.

Why do I like them so much? Because they don't rely on server side scripting
(which isn't available to all) and they don't use client side scripting (and
what happens if the user has a javascript disabled browser). Besides which
any form of browser sniffing (even reading HTTP User Agent variables) is
prone to failure. 

>   of the future. That is also why I dislike browsers who, despite
>   having different capabilities, claim to be something else.

Ah, we agree. I like common ground ;-)

J.

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Received on Monday, 18 November 2002 10:09:05 UTC