[WikiEN-l] A proposal to de-table Wikipedia infoboxes

[K. Peachey]

On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 10:30 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> By Hakon Wium Lie of Opera:
>
> http://www.princexml.com/howcome/2009/wikipedia/infobox/
>
> What is the likelihood of making as much as possible CSS? How to make
> infoboxes degrade gracefully for non-CSS browsers and IE users?
> - d.
Infoboxes are tubular data (in most cases) so they can and commonly
should be displayed in tables.

The author has only taken in account standards compliant browsers
(Firefox, Safari, Opera to name a few) which is wrong since they are
not 100% used, i believe IE 6 which is hardly compliant in these
matters is still at 40% usage, thats just the people visually
accessing (eg: monitor and web browser), we also have to take into
account people using screen readers and other such methods for
accessing the internet.


Lets look at some of his "Suggested principles":
* style attributes are not allowed
Style attributes are the basis for all CSS (eg: height, width, float,
color just to name a few) formatting whether you do it using inline
css or from a separate file.

* table markup are only used for real tables, not for layout purposes
These are real tables, Tables are for anything being shown in a
tabular format which they are and even his (or her) example shows this

* all div and span elements have a class attribute with a meaningful value
They currently do, the infoboxes that have classes being used are
generally using them to attach/identify the appropriate metadata

* semantic elements (e.g., dl, dt, dt, ol, li are preferred over div
and span, when appropriate
A div is a "container", those semantic elements he has listed are
forms of lists <http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/lists.html>, text
whether it being formatted into paragraphs or simple lists (aka dot
points/numbered) should be within a container (aka a div). A span
element is a current and standardized method for modifying text within
it's container, for example you have a div which is designed to show
purple text but you want the last two words to be fluro green, you
would wrap this last two words in a span and style it accordingly.