And lo, Stewart Gordon didst speak in
alt.html,alt.
www.webmaster,comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html:
No it doesn't. Read the sentence that introduces the second code
snippet again (assuming you ever read it at all), especially the first
two words of it.
Here, I will quote you the relevant part of the article with my reponses:
"This whole big mess of code [the WYSIWYG block] serves only to insert a
blank paragraph for vertical spacing, accomplishable via <P></P>. All the
other tags are useless."
According to the spec, empty <p></p> tags should be ignored completely.
This is error #1: *All* the tags listed are useless.
"They're added because the editors are so dumb that if you have stuff like
font settings enabled they insist on adding them even to blank spaces. The
editors are also pretty dumb about failing to collapse redundant tags.
Even if the various font changes above were actually needed to make sure
that blank space was rendered correctly, you could have done it with:
<P ALIGN=CENTER><FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica" SIZE="+1"
COLOR="red"><B> </B></FONT></P>"
This is error #2. This is certainly not the furthest you could distil an
empty paragraph tag down to while including all of the formatting given
above. The correct replacement would be:
CSS:
p.empty {
text-align:center;
font:bold 110% Arial,Helvetica;
color:red;
}
HTML
<p> </p>
However, even this is spurious, since the entire section of code, both CSS
and HTML, is completely unnecessary. You may respond to this saying:
"Hey, it was only an example to collapse redundant tags, not a
recommendation as to what coders should actually use." Aha, well, I offer
you the next paragraph of the article:
"Note how the three different centering tags were reduced to an attribute
of the single paragraph tag, and the three different font settings were
made into attributes of one FONT tag. This produces a shorter, cleaner,
more logical piece of code, showing the advantages of coding by hand
instead of using some silly editor!"
So, with this confirmation, WYSIWYG'ers come away with the idea that the
use of the tags above is both correct and acceptable. This is not a good
thing.
Assuming that, if they had made it look very "fancy" in the WYSIWYDG,
then they don't mind that the site'll look more basic until they've
learned the particular bits of CSS to achieve the desired level of
fanciness.
"Fanciness" is overrated. Accessibility isn't.
Grey
