On 22 Feb 2007, at 12:07:21, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
A far bigger problem in my opinion is this recent fad for placing
tabular data
in definition lists. Where did that come from? The result really is
incomprehensible because even the best screen readers can make
little sense of
the resulting code, no matter how semantically perfect it might be,
whereas
there are numerous tools for reading and navigating data tables if
they are
marked up correctly.
The widespread abuse of definition lists is indeed a baffling
phenomenon, and almost every example I've seen is best characterised
as completely ignoring the semantics of such a list - although the
person responsible will claim that it's "more semantic" than a table.
It's similar to the fad from a couple of years ago for marking up
calendars using floated <div>s (or, possibly, <ol>s).
I think that when people get the idea that "tables shouldn't be used
for layout" they somehow end up translating that into their heads as
"tables should never be used for any purpose whatsoever". When faced
with clearly tabular data, they then scratch around in Google looking
for some "semantically pure" way of representing it, and finish up
following articles with all these crazy <dl>s, never truly
understanding what they're doing and why it's so wrong. In fact, I
think some people believe "semantically correct" is a synonymous term
for "not having any <table> elements."
Given the range of accessibility features built into the <table>
model (things like colgroup, and the axis, scope and headers
attributes) it's clearly of great potential benefit to users of
assistive devices if tables are used properly as needed (i.e. for
tabular data). I believe that many current assistive technologies
make little use of such features, but that's probably because those
features are so seldom used in the wild. Perhaps if we abandoned our
shenanigans with definition lists and started marking up our tables
correctly, we could make it worthwhile for the manufacturers of such
technologies to support those features.
(End rant.)
Regards,
Nick.
--
Nick Fitzsimons
http://www.nickfitz.co.uk/
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