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[Richard Bennett]

On Saturday 15 January 2005 23:06, aardvark wrote:
> > > > Besides, all assistive technologies will have an easier time parsing
> > > > well-formed content.>
> > >
> > > well, i believe the content is well-formed, regardless of the DTD...
> >
> > From an xhtml point of view I mean, having closing tags everywhere, or
> > autoclosing like <br />
>
> now i'm curious... based on the assistive technologies i have access
> to (center for the blind, for example), none of those tools have a
> problem with the code unless it's div/table soup (which isn't how i
> write code)...
I'm not saying they'll necessarily fail, or that there's anything wrong with 
your site in this regard, simply that well-formed code (be it html4 or xhtml) 
is easier to parse with any parsing tool, and that by validating xhtml you 
will catch these errors, while html4 validators allows unclosed tags to slip 
through. 

> to what tools are you referring?  what sort of real-world impact does
> a non-self-terminated tag have on them?
None probably, my point was that if you require a certain standard from people 
you work with, either you can ask for xhtml/508 which will give you clean 
code with alt/title attributes and more, or you can ask for html4, and then 
specify that alt/title attributes are required and <li> and <p> needs to be 
closed etc etc, which seems more problematic to me.

> i'm on joe clark's accessibility mailing list, too,
Which is that exactly? I found 6 but not sure which is for accessibility...
> and i haven't 
> heard any discussion of that nature... more along the lines of non-
> semantic/structural problems (which i don't believe i have)...
Again, nothing wrong with your site, this is just about whether or not xhtml 
is a good default standard to go for, or not.

Joe himself writes: "Like all my new uploads, the page validates as proper 
XHTML 1.0, so it will not be incompatible per se with any browser or screen 
reader."
http://www.joeclark.org/access/crtc/digitaltableintro.html

That's what I mean too, not that xhtml is the ONLY way to be accessible.


Cheers,

Richard.