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Re: Question about web page "remediation"

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From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: May 17, 2013 1:11AM

2013-05-17 2:57, Jan Heck wrote:

> Does anyone happen to know of a tool that will strip out inline styles and
> other "nasty" stuff in old legacy web pages?

There are probably tools that do such things, but I doubt whether such
processing has any (positive) impact on accessibilility. After all, what
can you do with <p style="font-family: Verdana">? I mean if you were a
computer program. You could introduce an id attribute for the element,
carefully generating an id value that is unique on the page, remove the
style attribute, and put a style sheet rule like #dvbkzh12 {
font-family: Verdana } into a style element or an external style sheet.
This would not make the source code more readable, and it would not
affect the visual or other rendering, so what would be the point?

If you meant that inline styles would be just removed, then, well, you
would change the visual appearance of the page, and it would be very
hard to predict the total effect - or its impact, in any, on accessibility.

> I don't believe HTML Tidy does that

HTML Tidy has the option of "cleaning up" inline styles (style
attributes) and presentational markup. Here is an example, using the
online version http://infohound.net/tidy/ on the document

<title>foo</title>
<p style="font-size: 120%">bar</p>
<font face=Verdana>foo</font>

The result is:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta name="generator" content "HTML Tidy for Linux/x86 (vers 25 March 2009), see www.w3.org" />

<title>foo</title>
<style type="text/css">
/*<![CDATA[*/
span.c2 {font-family: Verdana}
p.c1 {font-size: 120%}
/*]]>*/
</style>
</head>

<body>
<p class="c1">bar</p><span class="c2">foo</span>
</body>
</html>

In which sense would this be an improvement? The class names do not say
anything, so the code has become less readable. The names are
conveniently short, at the cost of being generated in a faulty way: HTML
Tidy does not check whether the original page actually contains the
classes c1 and c2!

> I'm trying to help a non-profit make their
> site accessible, and the code is horrendous.

Horrendous code generally needs to be abandoned, not improved. The more
horrendeous it is, the more it costs to fix it, and the cost is
generally larger than the cost of redesigning and rewriting the site.

But even horrendous code can be relatively accessible. If it's not
broken, don't fix it. If it has essential accessibility problems, then
you may consider fixing them if you can - this can be fairly easy in
some cases, or it can be hopeless (without rewriting everything). It
really depends on the code and on the accessibility problems.

Yucca