Re: Layout tables

I'm not convinced that people need to move to XML just because it is better.
There is value in using XHTML, since there are more browsers that can cope
with it on a wider variety of platforms, and since specifying it effectively
makes people work a teensy bit harder to think about validity.

Unfortunately Dreamweaver still doesn't handle it as far as I can tell, but
it is capable of producing code clean enough that it can be run through tidy
afterwards to make it XHTML.

(Which should answer the question about tools - go download tidy for the Mac
(or anything else) from the Tidy page http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/tidy
and you have the tools.

Dreamweaver also has a VERY basic accessibility check built in - it produces
something like a bobby report in your browser, but doesn't yet help fix it
up. (It does link to the checkpoints in WCAG, so it's a start.)

Personally I am using Dreamweaver a lot at the moment (I would prefer to be
using Amaya, but I have some system issues to sort out before I have that
running happily again). It works fine if you know what you are doing, and
think a bit in the design phase, although it doesn't yet feel like a tool
that actively supports accessibility. SO knowing the QuickTips (or even
better WCAG) is a big step forwards.

Cheers

Charles McCN

On Fri, 9 Mar 2001, Marti wrote:

  Just to get a bit to "practicality" into this -

  There is a fairly typical 'web company' I deal with a lot.  Most of their
  designers know some HTML but still use things like Dreamweaver for most
  tasks.  They can be convinced to consider accessibility occasionally when it
  doesn't interfer too much with the visual layout or slow them down.
  They are about to start the design on a new website, I would like to
  encourage them to start using XML.  The question is: what tools are
  available right now to help them?  Just to complicate matters - more than
  half of the designer/developer platforms are MacIntosh and the management
  has this odd preference for NN.
  To get anywhere we need to get people DOING IT, for that we need a clear
  path and some good rationale for changing methods that 'always worked
  before'.
  Marti



-- 
Charles McCathieNevile    http://www.w3.org/People/Charles  phone: +61 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative     http://www.w3.org/WAI    fax: +1 617 258 5999
Location: I-cubed, 110 Victoria Street, Carlton VIC 3053, Australia
(or W3C INRIA, Route des Lucioles, BP 93, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France)

Received on Friday, 9 March 2001 09:39:05 UTC