RE: Front Page again

> From:	Michael W Baker [SMTP:bakerm@zin-tech.com]
> 
> I am developing accessibility standards for my company. We do government
> sub contracting and a lot of government sites use Front Page for design. I
> need to explore accessibility solutions (or have definitive reasons why it
> can't be done)for this product. 
> Are there ways of designing accessibly with Front Page?
	[DJW:]  
	I'm pretty sure that if you know how to write HTML
	you can write good HTML in Front Page.  The problem
	is that the user interface encourages bad habits, and
	it seems that it is fairly easy to generate invalid 
	HTML as well.  Early versions generate a document type
	that only permits HTML 2.0, which will need fixing for
	most pages!

	The sorts of ways that it encourages problems are by
	making presentational features easy to use, by putting
	them on the tool bar, but hiding the proper structural
	ones; I think that is consistent with the target WYSISWYG
	market.

	Obviously it also encourages the use of canned formats,
	automation etc.

> Is it possible to fix a page designed on Front Page?
	[DJW:]  
	Dave Raggett's Tidy program was designed to try to
	create valid HTML from it.  Accessibility requires
	human intervention though.

> Are there any resources addressing this issue?
> (Personally I would never use this product, but I need to deal with a lot
> of Front Page sites and Front Page users.)
> 
> 
[DJW:]  There's actually an accessibility thread running
on the lynx-dev mailing list in which two different sites
(I think Ohio State is the problem one and a newspaper the 
good one) are producing pages with a Front Page meta tag
(possibly hand retouched) and one is virtually unnavigable
text only, whereas the other is no problem.

The fundamental problem is almost certainly that the people
who like using Front Page don't like to think about information
(as against specified browser graphic) design.

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Received on Monday, 31 July 2000 15:29:04 UTC