Coherence without CSS (was Bidi Markup vs Unicode control characters)

Tex Texin wrote:
>It is not clear to me that we need to insist on the document being
>coherent without css.
>
>...
>Similarly, without positioning information that is in css styles, some
documents become unsolved jigsaw puzzles.

This is probably not what anyone wants to hear, but  if you live in 
the U.S. and have to comply with federal Section 508 accessibility 
standards, then it is REQUIRED that docments linearize correctly 
without CSS (i.e. be coherent).

Paragraph D
"Documents shall be organized so they are readable without requiring 
an associated style sheet."
http://www.section508.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=Content&ID=12#Web

This is because can use "float:right" and other CSS positioning 
tricks to "reogranize" your content completely differently in the 
layout from how is typed in the the document. Current screen readers 
will get confused and read things in document order and  "out of 
layout" order (in theory, you could fix the screen readers, but that 
would take about 5-10 years to implement).

Of course, standard U.S. screen readers don't handle Unicode outside 
Western European languages well at all...but that's another thread 
(sigh).

Elizabeth
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Elizabeth J. Pyatt, Ph.D.
Instructional Designer
Education Technology Services, TLT/ITS
Penn State University
ejp10@psu.edu, (814) 865-0805 or (814) 865-2030 (Main Office)

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Received on Tuesday, 16 August 2005 13:11:03 UTC