The <br /> tag seems to get short shrift a lot. Perhaps because it contains no content and appears to have no meaning within a document. You can’t communicate any of the information that a line-break contains structurally because it seems to be a purely presentational element. Robert Nyman boils the issue down to a number of different perspectives on line breaks: “no”, “yes”, “I don’t know”, and “who cares?” (Perspectives have been paraphrased. A lot.)
Continue reading “Is a br tag semantic?” »Category: Web standards
One Step Forward, One Step Back
Microsoft has taken a fairly respectable step forward with Internet Explorer 7. They haven’t made it to the front of the pack in web standards by any stretch of the imagination, but at least the latest version of their browser can sort of keep up. However, sometimes you wonder whether they have an internal requirement to maintain an overall status quo for web standards: for example, the decision to use Microsoft Word to render HTML (HyperText Markup Language) email in […]
Continue reading “One Step Forward, One Step Back” »Beyond Validation
For any qualified web developer, code validation is a step. Usually a step which is repeated frequently through the development process – and an important step, certainly, but just one small step in the process to create a standards-based, accessible web design. Validation, by itself, should never be considered as a primary signifier concerning the quality or accessibility of a website: not all validations are equal, after all. There are a number of important questions to be asked when looking […]
Continue reading “Beyond Validation” »Semantic formatting for interviews
This is a question which came up once upon a time at Cre8asite Forums, and it intrigued me. An interview, next to a standard article format, is possibly the most common type of written document on the web. Interviews pretty much always follow a very straightforward sequence: Question and Answer. An interview may have one interviewer with one interviewee, or may have several of each. In either case, the tag should be able to support some form of citation to […]
Continue reading “Semantic formatting for interviews” »What CSS means for Accessibility
Loren Baker recently published an article by Mikhail Tuknov entitled Benefits of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) in Search Engine Optimization. It’s a basic article describing the potential benefits of cascading style sheets in regards to SEO, maintenance, etc. General purpose CSS advocacy. In general, if you aren’t convinced that CSS is worth using, it’s probably worth reading – however, it does emphasize one fallacy which is, personally, a pet peeve. CSS makes your website more accessible. […] By separating style […]
Continue reading “What CSS means for Accessibility” »