On Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 2:39 AM, Daniel Friesen lists@nadir-seen-fire.comwrote:
What are people's opinions on the idea of taking these removed presentational attributes, and turning them into sugared parts of WikiText that are output as actual css in the output.
The change would essentially mean that this: |valign=top width=100%| Would become:
<td style="vertical-align: top; width: 100%;"> Instead of this: <td valign="top" width="100%">
That's basically what I've advocated for the last 7 years or so about what we'd do if/when that crazy "HTML 4 Strict" or "XHTML 1 Strict" or god forbid "XHTML 2" came along and actually mattered to anything for any purpose...
I'm not entirely convinced it's necessary at this stage though; HTML 5 draft spec has some wishy-washy language about "obsolete non-conforming features" that authors "must not use"[1], but I'd be a bit surprised if browsers are actually dropping support for <font> or @valign.
If it's just about feeling good when you run through a validator tool, a smarter validator tool that looks for things that are *actually* problems might be better to use. :)
Would anybody care to do some tests to confirm what the actual state of things is?
That said they're mostly trivial mechanical transformations, which both shows it'd be easy to do and proves how unnecessary it is to actually do the conversions.
[1] http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/obsolete.html#obsolete
I can only find one downside. Text browsers like w3m do make use of
valign but don't support css, hence the change does make the valign revert to normal vertically centered alignment.
Note that that's the fault of using an old unmaintained browser: other text browsers like elinks understand at least some CSS (though none of lynx, elinks, nor w3m understood vertical-align: top on a table cell in a quick local test).
Simple fact is nobody seems to care about text-mode browsers enough to make one that actually works with the modern web (which is a very CSS & JS-heavy world if you go anywhere beyond just reading text); they're just old leftovers that a few geeks occasionally whip out for fun.
- This has absolutely nothing to do with web accessibility; Screen
readers output to things like audio and braille, and hence don't display things visually so alignment means nothing to them.
And more importantly, *screen readers hook into real modern browsers, which understand things like CSS and JS*. Nobody should assume that how things render in crappy old 'lynx' has anything to do with how a blind user with a screen reader will experience a page -- we need some actual accessibility-oriented folks to do testing with actual tools for that.
-- brion