[Irl-dean] Opinions: HTML Transitional and WCAG Double-A

[Joshue O Connor]

> do you think it is ever reasonable to
> claim WCAG Double A conformance for a page that is presented in
> HTML Transitional? Assume that it *is* valid (whether HTML 4 or
> XHTML 1 etc.) - but that is not the point at issue. 

In terms of the accessibility of the page - this should be measured in
real terms. Can user agents access semantics from the document and can
the user comfortably and easily use the page?  I don't wish to say that
conformance to WCAG is not important - but I don't think it is as
important as creating accessible and usable web pages, even if they
potentially are not *technically* compliant.

> I want to probe how people see/interpret the distinction between
>> Transitional and Strict, and how that relates to WCAG
>> conformance.

The use of transitional versus strict doc types (for me) implied that
strict was somehow better (due to its purer nature, no presentational
elements etc) as it forced good development practice through having to
separate content/presentation/behaviour but due to lack of support in
legacy browsers for CSS it was maybe *safer* to use a transitional doc
type until either all legacy browsers were in the bin or everyone was
using a standards aware browser. As a result I still continue to use a
transitional document type and I guess this is kind of silly and I
should make the leap to using strict XHTML 1.x DTD - especially now IE 7
has hit and _good_ browsers such as Firefox etc are gaining ground.

Maybe I am getting on but HTML 4 still seems kind of new to me :)

Josh

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