- From: Gregg Vanderheiden <po@trace.wisc.edu>
- Date: Thu, 2 Jul 1998 13:34:30 -0500
- To: "'GL - WAI Guidelines WG'" <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
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 For a list of our listserves send "lists" to listproc@tracecenter.org
Received on Thursday, 2 July 1998 14:39:13 UTC