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Re: Text-only parser scripts

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From: Chris Heilmann
Date: Jun 28, 2004 4:34PM

richard wrote:

>I want users to my site to be able to click on a link which then runs a script and transports them to a text-only version of the page.
>
>Does anyone know of a script which will take the content of any HTML or ASP page and convert it to a text-only page, accessible to everyone?
>
>Many thanks
>
>
Technically it is pretty easy to create a script like that, however, a
text-only version of a web site is not necessarily accessible. If you
create your web site in a clever way, then you can be fully stylish and
accessible.

HTML is the structure of the document - Headlines, Paragraphs, Lists
(The navigation being one of the lists)
CSS is the presentation layer - Adding colours, layout and screen
furniture (images) and
Javascript the behaviour.

If you make a clean separation of those, all you need to offer for a
"text only" page is to turn off the style sheet.

"text version" pages were mainly done for slow connections and text
browsers, but newer assistive technology does benefit a lot from good
HTML structure, hence a text-only version, done by stripping out the
tags is actually harder to use...