Oh, I very well know what CSS should be used for. I also know what HTML should be used for, and what the intended usage for the Internet was (sharing of (computing) resources).

But only the most naive person would escape the notion that the web is mostly about presentation - whether that's being delivered by CSS or HTML attributes. Most web authors, and an even greater percentage of clients only care how something looks - and not about being good citizens.

As for screen readers, they just do that: read the screen, or rather, text in widgets. It doesn't matter for a screen reader whether CSS is used to color a text red, or a FONT element. It may be tuned to distinguish between bold/normal font, but again, it doesn't matter what caused the boldness. It does pay attention to links though. Pages that consist purely of clickable images (and no ALT text) sound like "LINK LINK LINK LINK" (but then very very fast).

If you want to cater for blind people, you'd be wrong to think that CSS will do the trick. You should focus on the content - not the presentation, and not the separation of presentation and content (of course, that's still a good idea, but mostly for a programmers point of view. It would help if browser actually allowed for user supplied style sheets, but that isn't commonly found on browsers. Even something simple as setting the fonts and fontsizes for P and H1 to H6 seems to be lost after the Mosaic browser).

Don't get me wrong either. I'm not saying CSS is useless. But from the moment the first style-sheet aware browsers were available (1994/1995 - using DSSSL, no CSS available at that time), I predicted that it wouldn't change the web. It would still be about presentation, and little content. And CSS only makes it easier to make webpages that are hard to understand if you don't confirm to the presentation the author intended. And unfortunally, history hasn't proven me wrong.

In reply to Re^8: Web forum markup language and the Monastery ([[...]]) by Anonymous Monk
in thread Web forum markup language and the Monastery by szabgab

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