Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with screen readers is summarized "Screen readers assume the content inside a table is tabular". Are divs better just because they are undefined? It seems to me that the problem would more easily be solved by adding some attributes to skip tabular treatment or to add captions, rather than ditching tables altogether. Table elements like could even be used to identify and access parts of the UI pages.
> Screen readers assume the content inside a table is tabular I'm curious to hear from screen reader users. I recall that the gap between "what web developers think screen readers do" and "what screen readers do" has always been sizable.
CSS Grid – Table layout is back. Be there and be square
181–190 of 280 posts
Re: CSS Grid – Table layout is back. Be there and be square
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know if developers even care about semantic markup anymore, just have your 5 meg of JavaScript squirt out a bundle of divs and to hell with accessibility.
Just render a png file, server side. The only way to ensure pixel perfect layout, and it's even going to use less bandwidth than most JS frameworks these days.
Re: CSS Grid – Table layout is back. Be there and be square
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most divsoup-layouts are not semantic at all, either.
Exactly this. How are DIVs more semantic than TABLE? And who is reading the source? Your developers and a web spider. The web spider doesn't care (I wrote one and getting it to parse DIV content and TABLE content wasn't much effort) As far as I am aware no spider is looking at the DIV and gathering semantic information from it. Sure, it may look at the TABLE and initially assume it has tabular data in it, but a tiny…
DIVs are not actively anti-semantic. They are just a-semantic. So they're not particularly right, they're just not actively wrong.
Re: CSS Grid – Table layout is back. Be there and be square
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most divsoup-layouts are not semantic at all, either.
Not to mention that tables sized using % are as responsive as 90% of their css counterparts, whatever they are.
Re: CSS Grid – Table layout is back. Be there and be square
#185Re: CSS Grid – Table layout is back. Be there and be square
#186Re: CSS Grid – Table layout is back. Be there and be square
#187This doesn't really fix much - if the idea is to continue to use pixel-based positioning. I've got devices with a range of dot-pitches (surface 4 pro, external older monitor, cellphone) - with various physical screen sizes -- A "150px sidebar" doesn't work the same across these devices - and more importantly, for a low-resolution 24" screen I'd probably want a similar 3" side-bar as for a "retina"-resolution 24" scre…
Re: CSS Grid – Table layout is back. Be there and be square
#188Re: CSS Grid – Table layout is back. Be there and be square
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
Originally, it was not known that HTML pages would be so finely designed. It is not a naieve dichotomy, it is an attainable ideal that has had a very positive effect on the state of the web. We owe huge thanks to this movement that lead both to the demise of proprietary browser extensions (like flash) and to the awesome technologies in browsers today such as these CSS features, new HTML elements and transport protoco…
These things, while beneficial, don't owe their existence to CSS. Instead, introducing eg. CSS shapes or `content: ` (as two extreme examples) was the way of least resistance/guerilla tactics, as opposed to putting the functionality into SVG proper, or aligning the layout box model better with the DOM model, resp. Now what we're left with is a way overcomplicated mess for generations to clean up. There's a reason Moz…
What would have been better would be a flat map identifier -> binary (or string or whatever, your choice) as the content, and then "CSS" (quotes because it wouldn't be the CSS we know now) would declare the layout/look and would read the content map for insertion into placeholders declared in the "CSS". I've omitted programmable considerations cause this is a HN comment and not intended to be formal proposal. Not surprisingly, the web has kinda already shifted towards this, through the use of JSON APIs in JS.
Re: CSS Grid – Table layout is back. Be there and be square
#190I don't suppose there is any momentum for starting over with something not based on a simple word-processing model, but with a real UI foundation.