Re: Len's CSS solution for the text in image problem - will designers adopt?

At 03:06 PM 10/23/2000 , Wendy A Chisholm wrote:
>Kynn, Cynthia, Marshall, and others who represent designers, do you think it will it be accepted by designers?  It's using CSS which won't be supported on older browsers which causes me to anticipate designers balking at this.

In short, no, but I don't think I could convince anyone, especially
Len, because the argument "designers won't accept it and won't do
it" doesn't seem to hold much weight 'round here. :)

Any web designer who does this would get fired the minute that Marshall's
boss looked at the page in Netscape 3 and saw "it's broken", and would
get replaced by a web designer who understands the need for backwards
compatibility and thus uses a graphic to convey branding content.
(See Marshall's comments from a few weeks ago on this topic.)

By the way, I am not lightly using the word "content" after branding.
Branding is not "presentation", it is "content."  If you follow the
idea of using CSS entirely to effect branding, then you run the risk
of _losing content_ when CSS is not supported or available.

That loss of content is something web designers are concerned with,
and something we need to be concerned with.

I don't think it's as easy as limiting it just to trademarks, either.
There are legitimate reasons to not use CSS and to use graphical
images (such as font choices, effects, even kerning), and to say that
those are not good reason and accessibility MUST come first is pretty
restrictive to a web designer.

If I saw that as a priority 2 requirement, I wouldn't bother with
double-A accessibility at all.  (However, that is also a result of
the extreme brokenness of the compliance system for WCAG 1.0, too.
The two problems -- unreasonable demands on web designers and a poor
compliance scheme -- compound each other in unacceptable ways, making
WCAG 1.0 very flawed.)

--Kynn


-- 
Kynn Bartlett  <kynn@idyllmtn.com>                    http://kynn.com/
Director of Accessibility, Edapta               http://www.edapta.com/
Chief Technologist, Idyll Mountain Internet   http://www.idyllmtn.com/
AWARE Center Director                      http://www.awarecenter.org/
What's on my bookshelf?                         http://kynn.com/books/

Received on Monday, 23 October 2000 18:17:37 UTC