Re: css abuse

At 08:08 PM 9/28/99 -0400, Leonard R. Kasday wrote:
>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".

I guess old and new are class names.

>You then have color used for meaning, violating wcag.

You violate guidelines if you use ONLY color for meaning because it is
difficult to notice when the user is colorblind or the device does not show
color.

>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. 
>
I'm not sure what this means. I think an id or class is an attribute
already assigned to an element. Depending on the element type the element
may have different other attributes available, such as title or captions.
The id itself is not usually an element and have attributes.

>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?
>
I wonder if RDF could be used to attach metadata for a class?

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

CSS just has selectors for elements (e.g. for classes) and can attach
presentation for the elements that are selected by the selectors. The
meaning is in author's head when he dividing elements in his document into
different classes.

Marja

>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 23:05:41 UTC