I quite agree, Stan. Using properly coded pages to allow everyone, including the partially sighted to access a site, is good. As a sighted individual I can see where the headings on the page are at a glance. How does a screen reader know where the headings are to read them to the user? It looks at the HTML tags h1, h2 etc. It can't know that a table is being used for layout and will be looking for TH tags to see what the cell's heading is. Which won't be there as the developer has only used the table for layout, not tabular data.
It's been hard work getting my head around why we should/ should not use tables/ css etc. but it's been very worthwhile. I think as a result I write better, more portable code, and I know that things are much easier to change when the users mysteriously want to change the colours scheme at no notice etc. Once you know how you have written your stylesheets you only have to remember which divs and spans to use round your content and bingo! your page is exactly as you wanted without having to remember how wide column 1 is supposed to be or what the hex value is of the background colour of something. In my conclusion, CSS is relatively little known, a little tricky to initially master but so so versitile and powerful, and also much more DDA compliant than using tables for layouts. Our company is really big on getting things DDA (Disability & Discrimination Act) compliant.
So CSS doesn't work the same on all browsers etc. Well I can't access my online banking via some browsers. These things might be irritating but they are here to stay and in any case keep us on our toes.
No contest - CSS v tables is a one horse race. Unless you are trying to display tabular information in which case it's still a one horse race, just the other horse.
I quite agree, Stan. Using properly coded pages to allow everyone, including the partially sighted to access a site, is good. As a sighted individual I can see where the headings on the page are at a glance. How does a screen reader know where the headings are to read them to the user? It looks at the HTML tags h1, h2 etc. It can't know that a table is being used for layout and will be looking for TH tags to see what the cell's heading is. Which won't be there as the developer has only used the table for layout, not tabular data.
It's been hard work getting my head around why we should/ should not use tables/ css etc. but it's been very worthwhile. I think as a result I write better, more portable code, and I know that things are much easier to change when the users mysteriously want to change the colours scheme at no notice etc. Once you know how you have written your stylesheets you only have to remember which divs and spans to use round your content and bingo! your page is exactly as you wanted without having to remember how wide column 1 is supposed to be or what the hex value is of the background colour of something. In my conclusion, CSS is relatively little known, a little tricky to initially master but so so versitile and powerful, and also much more DDA compliant than using tables for layouts. Our company is really big on getting things DDA (Disability & Discrimination Act) compliant.
So CSS doesn't work the same on all browsers etc. Well I can't access my online banking via some browsers. These things might be irritating but they are here to stay and in any case keep us on our toes.
No contest - CSS v tables is a one horse race. Unless you are trying to display tabular information in which case it's still a one horse race, just the other horse.
CAroline : )