Re: Form Element Select and attribute selected

On Tuesday, Oct 21, 2003, at 12:45 Europe/London, Ageer, Lenin B wrote:
> we are in the process of making our website W3c(XTML 1.0 Transitional) 
> and Bobby AAA(W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0.).

Bobby is a tool, it is less then perfect. Its difficult to 
automatically test for a lot of things (how is a machine going to know 
if some client side scripting and whatever alternative you provide do 
the same job?), so its a good idea to perform the checks by hand (with 
a good understanding of the issues of course).

> But I am facing a problem there is a clash between xhtml and bobby.A 
> Form element (select ) causing this problem. Bobby requires 'selected' 
> but xhtml 1.0 don't allow 'selected' attribute.

Yes it does, just not in its minimised form. <option ... 
selected="selected">.

The issue appears to have nothing to do with the w3c validator (so why 
is this thread on this list?), but more to do with Bobby either not 
understanding XHTML 1.0 or understanding it but considering 
non-minimised attributes to be inaccessible.

File a bug report with Bobby if its a bug, and ask yourself why you are 
using XHTML in the first place. User agent support for it is currently 
very limited. For a professional site, I suggest you stick with HTML 
4.01 until support improves (although I'd go with the Strict variant 
rather then Transitional).

(BTW - that <select> loses out on the accessibility front on other, 
more serious, issues. It doesn't appear to be capable of performing a 
sensible function when JavaScript is not available - you might want to 
have a read of http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/forms/navmenu.html )


--
David Dorward
http://dorward.me.uk/

Received on Tuesday, 21 October 2003 08:07:51 UTC