Work when CSS turned off Re: Breadcrumbs

On Thu, 5 Aug 2004 01:32:28 +0000 (UTC), Joe Clark <joeclark@joeclark.org>  
wrote:

>
>> If someone codes [bread crumb links] as a list and uses CSS to add
>> "greater than looking" image characters before each link - then I  
>> believe that is NOT accessible because if I turn off CSS
>
> I don't see why we have to plan for that use case. It's WCAG 1.0 thinking
[...]

Well, there is a lot of th world that uses WCAG 1. There are a number of  
people  that use systems every day that don't support CSS (any of you  
screen reader users like to explain how well your software implements  
style sheets?).

The requirement is that the stuff makes sense without CSS, not necessarily  
that it loks the same. Shouldn't lack essential content (although you  
might want to put that in the title attribute for your list items or  
whatever you decide t use).

> I use Lynx every single day (how many people do?)

Another thing we have in common...

> and even I don't believe CSS-free Web usage has any legs whatsoever. We  
> *expect* people to use CSS. We cannot *also* expect people to make  
> everything work just the same way without it.

Do you mean, don't expect it to look the same, or don't expect to be able  
to use the web?

>> CSS should not be used to add semantical information through styling.
>
> Your battle has been lost: Generated content is part of the CSS spec and  
> will not be removed. Game over.

I think not. <b><font size=2 face=arial> was defined as part of the HTML  
spec that is still a W3C recommendation. Using a collection of spans for  
everything, and styling them, is syhntactically legal XHTML Strict + CSS.  
We are in the slightly messier business of defining good practice - when  
and how to use things to ensure taht we maintain accessibility.

The game is, in fact, afoot, my friend.

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile     charles@sidar.org
Fundación Sidar             http://www.sidar.org

Received on Wednesday, 4 August 2004 23:29:06 UTC