Re: Style sheet readability

> Basically it forms a lowest common denominator to ensure accessibility
> of content -- Is this constraint still reasonable and valid given the
> current state of browsers and assistive technology?  

It's fundamental to the philosophy of HTML; content should not be communicated
solely by presentation.  XHTML 2.0 drafts have just been released, and the
impression I get is that this tries to stress this separation even more.

Also, Lynx, text to speech systems, PDAs, mobile phones, etc. don't support
visual style sheets (a slight oversimplification for things like JAWS which
actually don't support audio ones but can't represent visual information from
the visual ones).  Black and white printers don't fully support them on 
visual browsers.

Also, I've had to disable browser colours after accessing sites with very
poor colour contrasts and disable font sizes when unreasonably small 
absolute fonts are used, and I don't always turn them on again immediately.

Also, a fundamental design principle for style sheets is that the user can
completely override every aspect of them, so that the site cannot rely on
their style sheet being used, even when style sheet logic is being used.

Received on Wednesday, 14 August 2002 01:33:52 UTC