HOW TO HANDLE INTERIMS AND FUTURES.

On of the problems we still face in out guidelines work is how to
handle the interim and future issues.  It is just too confusing
to say that people should use stylesheets for laying out pages
when we all know they don't work that way with any browsers
today.  Putting future next to them is confusing and won't be
accurate in 6 months anyway.

So we thought about building trigger points into guidelines so
that they make sense both today and after the trigger point has
been reached.

For example

LAYOUT OF PAGES

Once all of the major browsers support CSS-2 and the browsers are
used by the majority of users,  CSS should be used to control
layout and presentation.  Until then tables (to control layout)
and bit mapped text (for special text effects) may be used with
alternate accessible pages as necessary.

NOTES:
a) Support of CSS-2 refers to blah blah blah , positioning, blah
blah.
b) Major browsers means   Netscape, MSIE, Lynx, Opera, Others?)
c) The definition of "Majority of users" is actually up to the
page author.  That is, when are they comfortable using CSS to lay
out a page knowing that the page will appear quite differently to
browsers that do not handle style sheets.   It should be
remembered though that we want the pages to look good wihtough
style sheets anyway.


So what are your thoughts and suggestions on this approach?
Better than the past?
Good enough to address the major problem we had?
Got a better idea yet?


The editors



-- ------------------------------
Gregg C Vanderheiden Ph.D.
Professor - Human Factors
Dept of Ind. Engr. - U of Wis.
Director - Trace R & D Center
GV@tracecenter.org , http://tracecenter.org/
FAX 608/262-8848
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Received on Thursday, 2 July 1998 14:39:13 UTC