css abuse

Here's the question that came up in todays conf call.

Lets say an author defines some id's like

"old"

"new"

and then sets up a style sheet to color text corresponding to "new" and "old".

You then have color used for meaning, violating wcag.

Say you want to do the right thing, and assign a meaning to these id's,
something like titles or captions.  Ideally this would be a declaration
assigning titles to id's.  But I don't see anything like that in CSS. 

You could kluge something by putting descriptive text at each instance, and
making it invisible or visible depending on the style sheet, but is there
any good sway to do it?

Or does CSS make it easy to set up visual styles but impossible to directly
assign meaning to them to them?

Len
-------
Leonard R. Kasday, Ph.D.
Institute on Disabilities/UAP, and
Department of Electrical Engineering
Temple University

Ritter Hall Annex, Room 423, Philadelphia, PA 19122
kasday@acm.org        
(215) 204-2247 (voice)
(800) 750-7428 (TTY)

Received on Tuesday, 28 September 1999 20:05:06 UTC