#852 Accessibility - Use semantic markup plus CSS

[Wes Groleau]

I don't know how many blind people do genealogy, and
I certainly would NOT put a high priority on this, but...

It would be nice if style relied more on CSS instead of tables, and more on semantic markup plus CSS instead of
SPAN and DIV.

Perhaps there could be an overall aim to gradually
migrate in that direction when changing other things.

For example:

<div class="news_box" id="article1">
<span class="news_title">Actual Title</span><br />
<span class="news_date">actual date/time</span><br /><br />
Article paragraph one.<br />
<br />
Article paragraph two.<br />
</div>

would be better as

<div class="news_box" id="article1">
<h2>Actual Title</h2>
<h3>actual date/time</h3>
<p>Article paragraph one.</p>
<p>Article paragraph two.<p>
</div>

(with '.newsbox h2' etc. defined in CSS of course)

[KosherJava]

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Would you be comfortable submitting patches that implement your proposed changes? It is not just for accessibility, but increased use of CSS for positioning instead of tables would allow more flexible themes that allowed dramatically changed layout with just a CSS change. An example to look at would be the way we render person boxes in a tree. This currently uses tables to lay out the box.

[Wes Groleau]

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I am slowly working on minor improvements to my own site,
but what you ask is probably a bit out of my league.
However, if I come up with something I think is of value,
I will make it available.

[Greg Roach]

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One thing I looked at a while ago was using CSS to mimic the gedcom tag-structure. e.g. something like this:

<div class="fact">
<div class="BIRT">
<div class="DATE">1 January 1900</div>
<div class="PLAC">Westminster, London, England</div>
</div>
</div>

This is very quick/easy to generate from code, and gives the theme much greater flexibility in deciding on layout.

[Wes Groleau]

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"Would you be comfortable submitting patches that implement your proposed"

Do you mean:
- uploading into the patches area?
- attaching to this?
- checking out and in to SVN?
- something else ?