- From: Harvey Bingham <hbingham@acm.org>
- Date: Tue, 05 Sep 2000 16:30:02 -0400
- To: <w3c-wai-er-ig@w3.org>, <w3c-wai-au@w3.org>
XHTML1.1 is a significant cleanup of legacy intermixing of presentation with structure and content. http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/ I have just today noted two changes affecting accessibility. I guess the reasons, I was not party to discussion of why. I note that in Appendix A: Changes from XHTML 1.0 http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/changes.html#a_changes XHTML 1.1 represents a departure from both HTML 4.0 and XHTML 1.0. Most significant is the removal of features that were deprecated. In addition, some features that were available have been removed. In general, the strategy is to define a markup language that is rich in structural functionality, but that relies upon style sheets for presentation. 1. Drops from the anchor <a ...> the attributes tabindex and accesskey. These had significant accessibility use. The tabindex allowed short-circuiting the linear tab ordering, to allow a short-circuiting of long lists of links in the left-most column. Only those with explicitly enumerated tabindex="#" were considered. When these were exhausted, the unenumerated ones were considered in the order from the sequence in the document instance. Problems included skipped values, and duplicate values. I do not know why they were dropped. The workaround is to put the list of jump links before the long list in the leftmost column (often in a single leftmost cell of a layout table.) If the intent with XHTML1.1 is to have stylesheets replace layout tables, those existing documents with a layout table and tabindex would no longer have the benefit of the short-circuited behavior when tabbing through the links. The accesskey feature allowed author-assignment of a shortcut key pattern to a navigation action. These could override conventions of a particular operating system or application, so could become confusing. The accesskey assignments have no universally agreed use, so behaviors were uncertain. 2. XHTML1.1 drops support for the following element types. Most have been deprecated in prior versions of HTML or XHTML1.0: base basefont center font frame frameset iframe isindex menu noframes object s strike u The loss of object, with its list of alternative renderings, provided a default means to append as the last option a textual description of a non-textual object. This is presumably replaced by use of such textual description within each individual non-textual object. That static description is available for any reference to it, and can somehow be exposed as a user preference. Different references to such an object that need to use different descriptions would need to include those in the referencing context. Is this a coordination group issue? If so, someone please take it to CG. Regards/Harvey Bingham
Received on Tuesday, 5 September 2000 16:32:16 UTC