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Re: Re[2]: Include default text?

for

From: Andrew Arch
Date: Oct 24, 2004 5:53AM

Like Jukka, we consider that Checkpoint 10.4 is now deprecated (it does
start off with "until user agents ..."). Jukka gives good reasons for
ignoring it nowadays.

Andrew

-----Original Message-----
From: jkorpela [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ]
Sent: Sunday, 24 October 2004 9:11 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Re[2]: Include default text?

On Sat, 23 Oct 2004, glenda wrote:



> I'm still no further ahead on my initial question.

Really? It's very simple. Don't use default text, except when you can set
a meaningful initial (default) value for a text field.

> Some screen readers work
> fine without default text, older technology may not.

That "older technology" is mostly a myth, especially by now, and we surely
shouldn't make pages less accessible to the vast majority just to cope
with errors in ancient technology. Surely any user agent that cannot deal
with initially empty fields is impossible to use for surfing (since
most text fields on Web pages are initially empty) and surely
there are better alternatives. Even if we could serve them with some
tricks without disturbing the users of all other browsers, we shouldn't do
that. It's a disservice to try to help people to keep using
seriously outdated software that could and should have been replaced long
ago.

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

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