RE: Fw: Disturbing trend in tables

At 09:08 AM 1/17/01 -0500, Bailey, Bruce wrote:
>Dear Anne,
>Comments in line...
>Using <B> and <I> instead of <STRONG> and <EM> (physical markup versus
>logical) is illustrative of a fundamental lack of understanding of HTML.  It
>is quite sad that the most popular editors promote this bad behavior.  Using
><U> is worse.   There a number of better choices, including <CITE>,
><ADDRESS>, and <EM>.  Underlining text in a web page is confusing,
>especially to folks with LD, because people have come to associate underline
>with active links.

Well, I think you answered one of my concerns with Underline - whether it
would be chucked totally. I have no problem with it used for links but
wasn't clear what you were advocating on that issue. It's not too long ago
that we all learned to use B, I and U ... now you want to change those easy
to remember commands with different commands. That's fine, but it isn't
really an "accessibility" issue so much as a preference of some folks. Your
preference vs "my" preference ... The machine will take it either or both
ways, as long as you get the 1's and 0's right ...

>Where did you read that Front Page has no issues with how PWD's us the web
>pages it produces?  Certainly you did not find that nugget of information on
>this list.  

Actually, it was on this list. Ben Canning where Front Page produces
"inaccessible" pages and the only matter was the doctype which (someone
else.. Kynn?) pointed out doesn't affect how PWD's use pages. 

Your own experience indicates that this isn't true!  (You say as
>much in the paragraph after next!)  So how, in good conscious, can you
>recommend Front Page to people who know LESS than you about HTML and
>disabilities?

Because it's the best tool currently available to us. Front Page is
included in the Office 2000 that we have on all the county PC's... My
choice of Front Page over Word is more because you have more flexibility
with graphics in Front Page, and I want to encourage newbies to illustrate
their pages adequately. 

>Yes, mistakes get made in print.  I'm not sure I understand the point you
>are trying to make.

The point is that no matter how much some may hope "inacessible" pages will
someday be against the law, the "general public" still doesn't know that
blind, cognitively and otherwise disabled folks are using the web! 

>Okay, so you acknowledge that authoring pages which pass Bobby (i.e., making
>pages which are accessible) is difficult with Front Page.  This is exactly
>the point I am trying to make!  Web authoring packages, IMHO, should, AT THE
>VERY LEAST, produce VALID html.  (How tough and obvious is that?)

First of all, Bobby actually doesn't insure that pages are accessible (but
that grist for another thread another day) since it will pass as
"accessible" a totally text page devoid of any illustrations or markup! We
may differ on our interpretation of VALID html. To me, VALID html is the
code that's in the html book from the book store. When I (rarely) read the
code that's produced by a Front Page page, it looks valid enough to me ...
and it works when I hang it on the web ... You have a different
understanding of what VALID html is, 


They
>should also facilitate the creation of accessible pages.  Yes, one CAN
>produce accessible pages with Front Page.  But, IT IS MORE WORK THAN IT
>NEEDS TO BE.  I would love mainstream tools to enforce accessibility, but I
>realize that is too tough a sell.  Validity, on the other hand, is extremely
>easy (at least for an automated tool).  Happily, there is a very high
>correlation between accessibility and validity (at least with HTML 4 and
>latter), so I would gladly settle for that.

I honestly don't know what version of HTML is produced either on Front Page
98, which I use most of the time, or FP2000 which I can use at work if I
ever find time to work on a web page during school hours ... It would be
nice to be able to presume that if I'm using the latest version of Front
Page I'm also creating code on the most recent (or most universal) version
of HTML. 

					Anne

Received on Wednesday, 17 January 2001 19:17:14 UTC