Re: Who provides the stylesheets

At 07:34 AM 10/26/2000 , Leonard R. Kasday wrote:
>In WCAG 2.0, it says
>2.2 Use style languages, where available, to control layout and presentation. Where practicable, provide (or link to) multiple style sheets, each supporting a different output device.... it is advisable to associate a variety of style sheets with your Web content.

>Why was this made the responsibility of the web site?  It seems to me it would be better to allow the user to choose a style sheet, perhaps from some library supplied by WAI or various third party organizations.

Because of the way CSS is used in practice, the responsibility should
fall on the shoulders of the web site designer.  It's important to
remember that _CSS as defined by the W3C_ is not the way that _CSS
works in practice_.

In particular:

(1) The use of classes and ids as selectors means that it is very
     difficult to write viable "third party stylesheets" which will
     work effectively on a number of websites.

(2) There is very poor support in browsers for stylesheet selection
     and use; some browsers apparently do not even let the user
     specify a given stylesheet, breaking an important part of the
     CSS cascade.

(3) Stylesheets are not an easy concept to learn, and they are very
     much not intuitive to the user's model of web interaction.  The
     user should not be responsible for this level of detail, any
     more than they should be responsible for reading the source code
     of a web page.  The typical user of a website is likely not
     trained to create and use CSS stylesheets and should not have to
     be in order to access information or services.  Requiring this
     cognitive step -- being able to grok what a stylesheet is and
     what effect it will _and will not_ have on the display (which
     basically means "understanding the cascade", something which
     even browser programmers are unable to do reliably) -- is
     asking far too much from a user who simply wants to use a web
     site.

>If each web site provides (or merely links to) it's own selection of style sheets for e.g. various low vision situations, it could be hard for the user to choose the best one.  Seems to me it would be better to help the user apply his or her best personal accommodation.

See #3 above.

(Of course, the user agent guidelines say that CSS -- including 
user-select styles -- must be supported; I have no argument there
but I feel that the greater responsibility is on the web designer.)

-- 
Kynn Bartlett  <kynn@idyllmtn.com>                    http://kynn.com/
Director of Accessibility, Edapta               http://www.edapta.com/
Chief Technologist, Idyll Mountain Internet   http://www.idyllmtn.com/
AWARE Center Director                      http://www.awarecenter.org/
What's on my bookshelf?                         http://kynn.com/books/

Received on Thursday, 26 October 2000 14:10:27 UTC