RE: Dreamweaver templates and universal accessibility

Ivy,

> Does anybody know if use of Macromedia Dreamveaver's templates will
> compromise a web site's universal accessibility?

Current versions of DW do have much better support for accessibility than
many other editing tools, but as discussed in other threads here, you still
have to exercise close control - both in creating the templates to support
accessibility, and in training authors using them. 

> Or should we just stick with basic html, CSS, and javascripts?

I think you may be under a misapprehension as to the purpose and use of
templates in DW. The templates do *not* appear in the browser, but are used
as part of the editing process to generate finished HTML pages with whatever
technology you choose to allow: all the end user will see (if he inspects
the code) is some HTML comments marking parts of the code as editable or
not. (I am not aware that templates themselves are any more or less
accessible than the rest of the DW workspace to the *author* rather than the
end user.)

> What about 'include' clauses?

Includes (if you mean SSI includes) also have no impact per se, since they
are processed server-side, not client-side: so as long as what is in the
include file is accessible, this poses no problem.

Kind regards,

Lois Wakeman

--------------------------------
http://lois.co.uk
http://siteusability.com
http://communicationarts.co.uk

Received on Thursday, 24 June 2004 05:18:55 UTC