- From: Jason White <jasonw@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au>
- Date: Fri, 17 Dec 1999 12:11:09 +1100 (EST)
- To: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
I disagree with Scott's central premise that one and the same document can not, without an unsatisfactory compromise, be both visually appealing and structurally organised with appropriate markup. Style sheet positioning, as yet not widely implemented but for which support is now starting to become available, is designed to address this problem; and in the interim, one can of course embed proper structural markup within the table constructs that have been conventionally misused to produce formatting effects. In the latter scenario, the table can be linearized, thereby presenting the user with proper structural divisions, lists, paragraphs, headings, in-line semantics, etc. Mobile devices demand structural and semantic richness; style sheets support it, and offer the additional advantage of allowing the author greater control over presentation than is possible with HTML tables, in a specification that is expected to be uniformly implemented across user agents and operating systems. The increasing adoption of XML will only advance the trend toward separating content and structure from presentation. Taking these factors into account, Scott's proposal would be a retrograde move and I do not support it. The guidelines already provide that, where a document can not otherwise be made accessible, an alternative version may be created (checkpoint 11.4). Server-side techniques may be included under this checkpoint, but the basic position should remain unchanged: alternative versions are a last resort and an interim solution, to be avoided where possible.
Received on Thursday, 16 December 1999 20:11:57 UTC