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

At 02:53 PM 10/23/00 -0700, Kynn Bartlett wrote:
>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. :)

I agree. Len's solution (this is the mixture of graphics, text, and css to
show a parts of the logo as a graphic, and the rest as css, right?) but
anyway, Len's solution simply won't be acceptable to the majority of people.

Think of the following: Coca-Cola and CNN both use 'text' as logos. CNN has
their blocky text, and Coca-Cola has their signature font. Neither of these
can be shown in CSS, and so these logos would at best be a pale shadow of
the standard. Any other company that uses a stylized font, or certain text
graphic effects simply cant pull off this hybrid scheme, so they won't
accept it.

>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.)

My 'old' boss, by the way. My new boss actually approves of CSS :)

But Kynn's point is valid, and something I dealt with regularly. ANY
variations of the page caused problems, even when those variations were
caused by the different way Macs and PCs presented pages that I had little
or no control over (pixel size, gamma levels, form items). Something as
blatant as a different font? The site was BROKEN, and had to be fixed. This
caused me to have to use several images that I would have preferred to use
as CSS, because they HAD to be in the corporate font.

I finally won a major battle just before I left the compnay (and I believe
that I won it mostly because they only had me for 4 more weeks, so I got a
lot of pull on how things would look), and actually put a fair amount of
the text on the page in CSS. I did it because I knew I could control the
VP/President's view of the pages while they were in 'test', by only showing
them the pages in IE5, and that by the time the pages went live, I would be
at a new job, and the VP of Marketing was ready to explain why Netscape
didn't support the site's 'dynamic' features.

Needless to say, very few web designers can get away with that regularly,
and even then, I couldn't do everything I wanted to do.

In the 'real world' of corporate web design, I think we need to focus less
on the 50,000 foot view of perfect accessibility for all, and instead focus
on accessibility practices that these companies can accept. If they can
have their site look and work the way they want, and still be relatively
accessible, I think we can make that sell. If they have to change their
look and feel, their branding, what have you? They'll simply not do it. My
company was relatively small, but still spent hundreds of thousands of
dollars on a print media campaign, and the web page was going to benefit
from that expenditure, and carry that consistent look and feel, because
they spent money on it. That said, this argument over A and AA compliance
is relatively moot. If A compliance can be attained with the sie looking
the way the company wants, then that's a possible goal. If a single facet
of AA or AAA compliance changes the look and feel of the site, don't expect
it to happen. I for one don't have a problem with that, but I feel that
might be a minority opinion.

Marshall

Received on Tuesday, 24 October 2000 09:12:05 UTC