[thelist] Re: IE6 broken

Jeff Howden jeff at jeffhowden.com
Thu Sep 11 00:10:48 CDT 2003


diane,

><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><
> From: Diane Soini
>
> Can't use ems or % or "smaller" for font-size because
> of the cumulative effect. The site uses templates (as
> in struts, jsp and taglibs), and sometimes the same
> template is nested in more templates on one jsp than
> on another, with the effect being that that on one
> jsp the font-sizes are tinier
> than on others.
><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><

if you plan right, that can be avoided.  you should only apply non-100%
sizing to tags/classes/ids that'll never be nested.  for example, the <hn>
tags should never be nested.  doing so makes no sense and is wrong on so
many levels.  the same is true for <small>.  even without stylesheets,
nesting it would have undesirable effects.  all that's left to do is specify
100% on tags like p, div, td, th, span, li, dt, dd, etc.  your master size
control is the <body> tag with a percentage less than 100% if you're after
an overall font-size smaller than the default.

if the developers and/or jsp/struts/taglibs can't produce code even that
clean (which it can if the time would be taken to clean up the code they
produce), then it's not really the browsers fault.  i can't even begin to
imagine what this tagsoup nightmare must be like for the visually impaired.
i think your battle is on the wrong front.  you complain about a *minor*
rendering bug (most likely exacerbated by the tagsoup) saying "Accessibility
is broken for IE6" for something so tiny as to be barely an annoyance, but
pay no attention to the bigger problem of accessibility caused by the code
being produced?

ok, so you found a bug.  it's not as big of a deal as you say it is.  it's a
temporary change in font size when a link is clicked that only occurs when
the default text size is set to something other than the default, the link
is inline with some text, and even then only the line with the link is
affected for a brief second.  no offense, but your assessment of the
severity of this bug is completely off in left field.  it doesn't affect the
accessibility of the document.  it's annoyance, nothing more.

><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><
> Don't use tables you say? It is tabular data and the
> layout is too complicated to do with css and div tags.
><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><

um, i never said anything about tables.  but, now that you mention it,
what's up with tabular data with nested tables?  or, is it that you have
nested tables for the design and *some* of your usage of tables involves
tabular data?  either way, neither of those cases should pose a problem with
regard to using percentage sizing if the css is done right.

><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><
> Then there is the problem of the PDF generator that
> requires unclosed <span> tags inside of <tr> tags and
> all the other quirks. There's just no hope.
><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><

*cough*xslt*cough*

don't butcher your website html for the purpose of appeasing a pdf
generator.

.jeff

------------------------------------------------------
Jeff Howden - Web Application Specialist
Resume - http://jeffhowden.com/about/resume/
Code Library - http://evolt.jeffhowden.com/jeff/code/




More information about the thelist mailing list