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Re: Can I make my family tree chart accessible

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Jul 21, 2003 4:53AM

On Sun, 20 Jul 2003, Terence de Giere wrote:

> The definition
> term <DT> would be, say, "Parents", and the definition <DD>their names
> (each one in a DD element under the "Parents" term.

Sorry, but that sounds really absurd, even if you don't accept my
criticism of <DL> abuse in general
( http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/def.html#impl ).

A _definition_ for the term "parent" would say what we _mean_ by the word
"parent" in some context, e.g. the normal meaning in everyday language, or
the technospeak meaning 'immediately containing element', or 'the
process that spawned the current process', or something else. This is
_completely_ distinction from naming the parents of someone or something.
A definition for "parent" must be given or implied, before it makes any
sense to say "the parents of ... are" (or, in the odd technospeak, which
is actually an accessibility problem at language level, "the parent of
... is ..."). Hence it is absurd to call such information a definition.

If you're going to abuse <DL> _that_ bad, what are you going to use for a
real list of definitions?

Regarding family trees, there's hardly any better approach in practice
than using tables, though in theory you could use nested <UL> lists for
the structure and CSS for the formatting. On browsers that support the
display property in full, it is relatively easy to present lists in
tabular manner - but unfortunately IE 6 is not among those browsers.

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/