WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Web accessibility and usability

for

From: Patrick Lauke
Date: Oct 12, 2004 5:56AM

> From: michael.brockington
> ...
> Can anyone expand a little on what the second part of this
> statement means?
> The clickable part is simple, but _nothing_ can affect the
> original source
> code, so what does it mean?

It doesn't refer to the original source code (as in the source stored on the server), but the source as processed (internally) by the browser. When doing DOM based javascripting, the scripts have the power to add, remove, change any node in the document object model. Effectively, you can generate new elements, fill in new content, completely delete elements, etc. These changes affect the (internal) source of the HTML document as kept by the browser (client side).

A fairly trivial example of this would be my little "show outline" experiment : starting from a document, it creates a completely new html document in memory, pops in any headings it finds in the original document, then replaces the active document the browser uses with the one it just created from scratch. These are all javascript changes that affect the (internally used) source. If you do a "view source" after the javascript has been processed, you'll still see the original HTML. However, with something like the AIS web accessibility toolbar you actually get the option of viewing the "generated source", which will then show you the bare-bones new document the script generated.

Hope this made some kind of sense. Sorry for the lengthy (and possibly a bit circular) discussion on this...

Patrick
________________________________
Patrick H. Lauke
Webmaster / University of Salford
http://www.salford.ac.uk