By libre fan on
Hello,
This is just to say that Drupal and Firefox 2 go well together, and Firefox being kind to CSS, it's a good idea to use this browser to make accessible websites without tables, though I still haven't switched to a totally tableless theme (I'm using chameleon). and to encourage your visitors to switch to FF.
Merry Drupal and Firefox!
PS: I'm trying this SpreadFirefox affiliate signature -- sorry if it doesn't work or looks strange ;-)
Comments
Waiting for Steve Ballmer to use Firefox
I am waiting for all my customers and all the casual visitors to convert to Firefox.
I have stopped testing with Opera as that has died out now that Firefox is so good. Firefox seems to have killed off Netscape Navigator, Mozilla, and Opera. Has anyone noticed a drop off in any other browser visiting their site?
petermoulding.com/web_architect
petermoulding.com/web_architect
Glad you like Firefox!
Some people think Opera is faster I don't know as I'm rather partial to libre software. But anyway Opera follows Web standards I think so testing with Firefox should be okay for Opera users.
Don't wait for that SB man (no pun intended) to convert just convert him and others by displaying banners and buttons.
PS: my affiliate SpreadFirefox signature doesn't work because it's too long or Drupal doesn't like its content, so I've shortened it to the bare essentials.
Cheers
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Libres-Ailé(e)s (Association for Linux and libre software) (France, Cévennes)
Get Firefox! Rediscover the Web!
Yep, IE has lost from 43% to
Yep, IE has lost from 43% to 36% on drupal.org within this year. :p
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My Drupal services
Just a comment about tables
A site that does not use tables is not necessarily more accessible than one that does, even if they use them for layout. There is some kind of "religious war" against tables, people are afraid to use them because they think they will make them look uncool. Even in those cases when using tables is the right thing to do. I'm not implying you mean this, however.
I have seen things you wouldn't believe in the effort to "ban" all tables, for example in one project they had to show a calendar. A calendar is essentially a table of days, but they used lists and a ton of CSS to have the list look like a calendar (a table).
I don't agree fully.
Personally, I think tables have their uses - but certainly not in layout code.
With CSS3 around the corner, and plenty of UI libraries out there - valid, semantic XHTML and CSS should be used for layout while tables should be used to display data (this includes things like Calendars). Infact I think tables could be used more, but in the right context.
There are also a couple of cool jQuery plugins out there that allow you do things like table sorting on the fly which bring them right up to Web2.0 - so they are not dead yet.
About tables
You're right there -- a calendar is a table, CSS can be used to make it blue and gray, with bold font and such like. I was thinking of tables used to lay out HTML elements on the page (columns, images, site banner). I'm wondering how a speech synthetizer can render table-like columns.
Accessibility is an intricate matter, and tables (for layout) are only part of the problem.
cheers
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Libres-Ailé(e)s (Association for Linux and libre software) (France, Cévennes)
Get Firefox! Rediscover the Web!
Spoken Web pages
Can a speech synthesiser render CSS any better than HTML tables?
Some people perform unnatural acts to format pages with CSS. The underlying text is not naturally organised. The CSS rearranges the text into something viewable. To make sense as spoken words, the speech synthesiser would have to perform the same rearrangement.
When you throw text into tables, you are organising the text in a hieratical structure of rows and cells that may make more sense because the text is in a sequence. If you use nested tables then the text can be better organised than with single tables.
To get the same result with divisions and other elements that are reorganised with CSS, you have to move the intelligent text to the top, provide a cut off point where the listener can cancel the speech because the rest is just advertising/banners etc, and then rearrange everything with CSS so that the advertising/banners etc is at the top of the page. You have to use the latest CSS that does not work reliably with any browser and, when it works, produces inconsistent results across browsers. If you use a CMS then the CMS may send out the text and other stuff in a completely different sequence.
CSS needs more than CSS 2 to work effectively and I have not yet looked through CSS 3 to see if it contains everything that is needed. Even then, after CSS works and after the browsers implement CSS 3 and after the browsers finally agree on how they will present stuff formatted by CSS 3, we still have to wait until speech synthesisers implement enough of CSS 3 to work out how the text will be displayed so that they can work out what to present.
CMSs will have to change to present the data the way it is read. The markup will have to include speech indicators to specify what is read and what is repetitive overhead. The changes to CSS are completely independent of the use of tables versus divisions for structure.
Try working in radio. You have to constantly remind listeners of where they are so you constantly announce the station id but then you upset regular listeners with the repetitive announcements. The equivalent in a Web site is to remind people:
"You are visiting the drug pharmacy of Canada Web site dedicated to misleading medical information about obscenely expensive drugs".
The casual visitor needs that information on every page because they can visit any page randomly but then they need that information read out only every five or ten pages to remind them where they are. CSS needs a "read out only every ten pages" attribute.
petermoulding.com/web_architect
petermoulding.com/web_architect