(Or, more accurately, why the DOCTYPE is no more broken than any other potential switching mechanism.) In a recent article, “Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8“, Aaron Gustafson states that “the DOCTYPE [is] unsustainable as a switch for standards mode.” His argument is based on the problem that many developers and authoring tools now make use of correct DOCTYPEs despite the fact that they are not in fact using standards-based, valid code. Therefore, you can not actually assume […]
Continue reading “Why the DOCTYPE switch isn’t broken” »Category: Web standards
Graph the Semantic HTML Structure of Your Web Page
In October of 2006, I published a brief article about Marcel Salathé’s interesting Java Applet to generate node graphs of web page structure. In that article, I stated: I’d love to be able to produce graphs where I chose the color coding pattern for particular tags. I could set all non-semantic tags to be bright red, to easily spot the condition of a site in that respect. I could focus my attentions on inline versus block elements, or I could […]
Continue reading “Graph the Semantic HTML Structure of Your Web Page” »Alternative Text for Significant Images
In the comments from my most recent article, “Supporting Standards that Support Accessibility,” a number of interesting thoughts were raised concerning the requirement (or lack thereof) of the alt attribute in HTML (HyperText Markup Language) 5. It’s a difficult issue. I’ve seen numerous articles around the web which discuss the fact that HTML 5 does not require the alt attribute. To some degree, this is true: HTML 5 provides exclusions to the requirement. In situations where an image is significant […]
Continue reading “Alternative Text for Significant Images” »Supporting Standards that Support Accessibility
The justification that a web site is accessible because it “follows standards” contains a serious fallacy. Specifically, the assumption that standards support accessibility. One root of current standard accessibility practice is conformance to the HTML (HyperText Markup Language) or XHTML (eXtensible HyperText Markup Language – HTML reformulated as XML (eXtensible Markup Language)) standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)). This is a fine practice, and certainly should be maintained. Using correct syntax and following […]
Continue reading “Supporting Standards that Support Accessibility” »CSS3: On Grid Positioning and Layout
Following up on tables and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), the grid model of layout execution is part of the CSS level 3 working draft. The specifications for the grid layout module being discussed were released on September 5, 2007. This module describes integration of grid-based layout (similar to the grids traditionally used in books and newspapers) with CSS sizing and positioning. Document Abstract Semantically, the grid layout system is a nice development — it is a system explicitly and exclusively […]
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