Re: [166] Organize documents so they may be read without style sheets

On Friday, June 20, 2003, at 11:49 AM, Joe Clark wrote:
> The fact remains that the requirement, as written in WCAG 1.0, is 
> outdated.

Well, yeah.  But WCAG 1.0 has always had problems with CSS.

When the first drafts were produced, they DID require CSS, or at least 
they
recommended it for every single thing under the sun, nearly.  This was,
in my opinion then (and still now, based on history) premature and 
would have
blocked the adoption of WCAG 1.0.  Simply put, way back then there was 
no
support (in browsers, in development tools, in the developer community) 
for
CSS.

Thus WCAG 1.0, in final form, was forced to back off from a mandate for 
CSS.

However, as this is literally a different millennium, times have 
changed and
there _is_ widespread support for CSS.  The original WCAG drafts weren't
wrong -- just premature.

>> And the difference between floated and positioned elements, very 
>> roughly, is that floated elements are moved to one side or the other 
>> but are the same vertical position as they would be if not floated, 
>> whereas positioned elements can be placed more or less anywhere in 
>> the page, and can stay in one place on the screen while the rest of 
>> the page is scrolled.

This is a correct statement.

> In a word, no. _Eric Meyer on CSS_, p. 197: "So why did we go to all 
> that effort to use positioning when we'd already used float to achieve 
> the same effect and didn't have nearly as much to worry about? Because 
> now we have much more flexibility in terms of where the sidebar markup 
> can appear. With float, the sidebar had to come before the entry. Now 
> its markup can be anywhere from before the h1 to after the entry." 
> Merely one example.

Meyer's statement is a correct statement.

Why do you say "no"?

The two statements, in my opinion, seem to be saying the same thing.

Don't make me quote _Teach Yourself CSS in 24 Hours_ to you. ;)

--Kynn

--
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com>                     http://kynn.com
Chief Technologist, Idyll Mountain                http://idyllmtn.com
Author, CSS in 24 Hours                       http://cssin24hours.com
Inland Anti-Empire Blog                      http://blog.kynn.com/iae
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Received on Friday, 20 June 2003 15:39:01 UTC