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Re: Tables and accessibility, your opinions....

for

From: CFIT
Date: Oct 3, 2005 3:20AM

Thats a nice resource for some stylee table designs Christian.

http://icant.co.uk/csstablegallery/

Thanks for that!

Joshue O Connor

Web Accessibility Consultant

**Centre for Inclusive Technology (CFIT)* * National Council for the
Blind of Ireland

<EMAIL REMOVED> +353 1 8821915

Christian Heilmann wrote:

>>I'm of the general opinion that truly accessible web sites should not use
>>tables anywhere especially for layout, however an exception could be to use
>>[correctly marked up] tables for displaying data (and only data) such as
>>calendars.
>>
>>
>
>Well, tabular data is only accessible when marked up as a data table
>with the proper attributes connecting the data cells with the headers.
>IMHO there is no discussion whether a calendar should be a table or
>not.
>
>
>
>>For a site with static content the above rule is easy to implement with CSS,
>>however I'm finding very few dynamic sites that do not use tables somewhere
>>for layout. Of course the W3C guidelines are only guidelines and open to
>>interpretation so what constitutes "data" and "layout" could be open to
>>debate. Is a list of products REALY "data" and does it need to be displayed
>>in a table? It's easy to use CSS and lists to display such info.
>>
>>
>
>The name says it. A list of products can be a list. The use of a data
>table in this case depends on the complexity of the list. If you offer
>filtering of the list by any of the product attributes a table is the
>way to go.
>
>
>
>>So I think my first question is this: how do others in the industry feel
>>about the use of layout tables? Is there a commonly held belief that all
>>layout tables are bad or that are "some" ok if marked correctly?
>>
>>
>
>I haven't used any layout table in the last 4 years, basically as our
>products are enterprise level portals and sites that have to be
>localised in may languages or rebranded for third party vendors at a
>later stage. Only by separating content, structure and presentation
>you can easily manage and maintain these. A lot of the HTML is not
>developed by web designers, but by the .NET team, and I make sure they
>use the right markup for the job.
>
>
>
>>My second question relates to server side scripting and my example of a
>>product list. While its easy to display product information using CSS it may
>>not be so easy to manipulate that information using some dynamic techniques
>>without tables, in fact many of the DataBinding and manipulation techniques
>>in asp.net positively require tables.
>>
>>
>
>That is a flaw in .NET then and laziness of the vendor to make sure
>you can quickly put together dynamic sites without knowing anything
>about semantics. Microsoft has lately opened up to work with the WaSP
>group to rectify these issues.
>
>It is a matter of how you use .NET, it takes a bit longer but you can
>make it stop using bloated controls and generate spans all over the
>place. Step away from the design view in Visual Studio.
>
>
>
>>So which scripting language do people prefer when building accessible and
>>dynamic sites that use as few layout tables as possible? Is that even
>>possible?
>>
>>
>
>See above, with the right knowledge and effort it is possible even in .NET.
>
>Flexibility of CSS layouts with dynamic content is a big issue,
>especially as still too many designers see CSS as a pretty design
>layer rather than as a style sheet. Nobody uses XSLT stylesheets for
>creating image replacement, why use CSS?
>
>I have shown with the CSS Table
>Gallery:http://icant.co.uk/csstablegallery/ that data tables do not
>have to be ugly, I will soon release another project that strives to
>show that CSS can be used in an enterprise world, too.
>
>
>--
>Chris Heilmann
>Blog: http://www.wait-till-i.com
>Writing: http://icant.co.uk/
>Binaries: http://www.onlinetools.org/
>
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