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Re: use of <pre> tag

for

From: Simius Puer
Date: Nov 5, 2010 5:36AM

Hi Jared

Ha ha, I think you are taking my comments a little too-much out of context
by removing the first part of my sentence - it was after all a
*very*contextual remark and mirrors pretty closely what you have
concluded in your
final paragraph.

I was working off the basis that these were "quite lengthy legal documents"
as mentioned in the original enquiry, not a short bit of text which likely
contains no structural elements. Having said that, I have to disagree with
you and point out that my my email *does *contain *some* structural data
(who it's from, date etc) even if is taken for granted and I didn't take any
active part in putting it there.

I don't believe Julie was asking "whether surrounding long sections of text
data in a web page with <pre> will make it any more accessible" as she has
already stated: "I have many documents ... that *are currently being
presented in this manner*". Unless I have read that wrong what I am
envisioning is something like:

<pre>
a long and complex legal document which common sense tells us will contain
headings and paragraphs and possibly even ordered and unordered lists and
other basic structural elements
</pre>

If this is the case I don't think you would disagree that it really ought to
be marked up correctly.

I was also trying not to focus too closely on "is this technically compliant
or not" as this misses part of the bigger picture and is one of the reasons
many people have been criticised in the past for taking a "tick-box"
approach to accessibility. To that extent I would also have to say I have
grave reservations about your statement "if other relationships or semantics
are being presented through purely visual text changes, then appropriate
markup is probably necessary" - I would argue that there is not "probably"
about it ;]

Hope you are keeping well.