Re: Who provides the stylesheets

Kynn,

Would you point to a few examples of (1), use of classes and id's that 
would make it difficult to write third party stylesheets.  I agree that's a 
serious problem, but  I think I want to address it differently, and 
concrete examples may shorten the discussion (I hope  :-)  ).

Len

At 10:45 AM 10/26/00 -0700, Kynn Bartlett wrote:


>Because of the way CSS is used in practice, the responsibility should
>fall on the shoulders of the web site designer.  It's important to
>remember that _CSS as defined by the W3C_ is not the way that _CSS
>works in practice_.
>
>In particular:
>
>(1) The use of classes and ids as selectors means that it is very
>      difficult to write viable "third party stylesheets" which will
>      work effectively on a number of websites.
>
>(2) There is very poor support in browsers for stylesheet selection
>      and use; some browsers apparently do not even let the user
>      specify a given stylesheet, breaking an important part of the
>      CSS cascade.
>
>(3) Stylesheets are not an easy concept to learn, and they are very
>      much not intuitive to the user's model of web interaction.  The
>      user should not be responsible for this level of detail, any
>      more than they should be responsible for reading the source code
>      of a web page.  The typical user of a website is likely not
>      trained to create and use CSS stylesheets and should not have to
>      be in order to access information or services.  Requiring this
>      cognitive step -- being able to grok what a stylesheet is and
>      what effect it will _and will not_ have on the display (which
>      basically means "understanding the cascade", something which
>      even browser programmers are unable to do reliably) -- is
>      asking far too much from a user who simply wants to use a web
>      site.
>
> >If each web site provides (or merely links to) it's own selection of 
> style sheets for e.g. various low vision situations, it could be hard for 
> the user to choose the best one.  Seems to me it would be better to help 
> the user apply his or her best personal accommodation.
>
>See #3 above.
>
>(Of course, the user agent guidelines say that CSS -- including
>user-select styles -- must be supported; I have no argument there
>but I feel that the greater responsibility is on the web designer.)
>
>--
>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/

--
Leonard R. Kasday, Ph.D.
Institute on Disabilities/UAP and Dept. of Electrical Engineering at Temple 
University
(215) 204-2247 (voice)                 (800) 750-7428 (TTY)
http://astro.temple.edu/~kasday         mailto:kasday@acm.org

Chair, W3C Web Accessibility Initiative Evaluation and Repair Tools Group
http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/IG/

The WAVE web page accessibility evaluation assistant: 
http://www.temple.edu/inst_disabilities/piat/wave/

Received on Thursday, 26 October 2000 15:36:25 UTC