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RE: Can I make my family tree chart accessible

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Jul 22, 2003 9:05AM

On Tue, 22 Jul 2003 <EMAIL REMOVED> wrote:

> I must agree with Terence that by restricting DL to only definitions of
> terms, it would see litte if any use.

My point was that it really has little if any use, except for clear-cut
lists of actual definitions when you don't care too much about how it
looks like.

The W3C first defines DL as a definition list, then tells various foolish
things that absolutely contradic with the initial definition. The DL
element thus has no defined semantics, except in the sense that when using
it strictly for lists of definitions, you can't be wrong - but even for
them, normal lists or tables are often better. And it's poorly implemented
in browsers, in a manner that makes it fairly impossible to make them take
the preferred visual appearance using CSS.

There's hardly anything to be won using DL, since you can always use some
other markup, which is better formatted using simple CSS.

And considering accessibility, I think we should always be prepared to a
mode of rendering documents where the user agent explicitly tells the user
the markup of the page, in a manner that reflects the defined meanings of
elements. For example, a user agent _could_ (rather usefully IMHO) say
"blockquote" and "end of blockquote" or, more colloquially, "quote" and
"unquote", when it reads <blockquote>. Similarly, <dfn>foo</dfn>
could sensibly trigger verbose reading "foo (term being defined)".
And frames could be presented by explicitly reading the names of frames -
like many programs actually do. In fact, you could write a user style
sheet, using :before and :after pseudoelements, that generates such stuff
(though IE 6 sadly lacks support to this essential CSS 2 feature).

So are you prepared to hearing a browser say "Definition list follows.
Term: ... Definition: ... ... End of definitions." when it encounters a DL
element on your page? (Well, maybe browsers won't do that. What _should_
they do, then, to verbally convey the message of the markup that is
somehow reflected in the visual appearance. "Umm... let me think about
this... we might have a list of definitions, but it could also be just
a list of something with comments associated with the items, or maybe a
conversation. Let's say that I just read the markup and let you decide.
Here we go... DT ... DD ..."

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


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