Re: Browsers will never get it right [was Re:Blocked-base parsing?]

Orion Adrian wrote:

> But the reality is that even table-less design, removing CSS from
> pages usually ends up bad. 
...
 > And
> flattening a structure like that still doesn't make it renderable in a
> cell-phone. I certainly haven't seen any cell phones that have done a
> wonderful job of faithfully preserving all content while restyling the
> document as a whole.

If the documents themselves were reasonably well marked up in terms of 
structure, they should make sense even without CSS. Sure, there may be a 
few more DIVs and such present, so that styling can be facilitated later 
on, but disabling styling should still yield a structured document. Why 
wouldn't a cellphone "faithfully preserve all content"? Do they fuzz 
around with the HTML?

> As for feeds that use CSS, I find them inaccessible since it raises
> the requirement that my reader support CSS when that isn't even
> supposed to be a requirement for browsers. But it's something we've
> come to rely upon because we have it. Some people just don't care
> about small devices or the disabled.

Well, as I can't find an example of an RSS or Atom feed that uses CSS, 
here's the kicker question: if the content is marked up correctly, how 
do non-CSS capable readers react? Do they just show the unstyled (or 
rather, default styled) content? Because in that case, there is 
absolutely no accessibility issue here: you can still get the content, 
as it does not rely on the presentation. Or am I missing something 
fundamental here?

> I'm fairly positive it has something to do with VHS holding 6 hours
> and Betamax only holding 2. Though I could be wrong. Superiority is
> determined by the market.

Looking at the current market, I think it would be safe to say that RSS 
has *NOT* replaced HTML+CSS. Yes, a clued up, technology-savvy section 
of web users take advantage of it to keep up with things like news, new 
posts on fora, etc...but there's hardly evidence that one is replacing 
the other.

-- 
Patrick H. Lauke
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Received on Thursday, 15 September 2005 11:37:38 UTC