WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: WCAG 2 and browser ZOOM and font units

for

From: Austin, Darrel
Date: Aug 14, 2008 12:10PM

> Yet my agency requires and hires
> programmers to design using .NET without any skill level requirement
> for
> CSS or standard compliant coding or for that matter accessibility.

This is partly MS's fault, as--especially with asp.net 1.1--there wasn't
much in the way that required developers to even grasp what CSS and
valid HTML and the like was.

A lot of .net developers are folks that were VB or Windows App
developers. ASP.net came along and MS gave them an IDE that pretty much
looked like things were done back in the days of writing windows apps:
drag and drop grid layout (ie, absolute positioning), style properties
(ie, CSS, or even worse, FONT tags), datagrids (ie, HTML tables), etc.
Most every standard HTML/CSS element was renamed into some more 'windows
apps friendly' term that basically allowed developers to not have to
figure out the web at that point.

And to compound the issue, a lot of the built in asp.net controls in the
1.1 framework would then generate really ugly HTML.

The ASP.net framework upgrades (2, 3+, etc.) have improved quite a bit,
but I think there's a lot of bad habit hold-over from the earlier
transition to .net.

Of course, none of that helps you in any way other than me saying I
empathize and wish you luck! ;o)

-Darrel