Posted by Alan J. Flavell on 04/21/06 21:53

On Fri, 21 Apr 2006, JDS wrote:

> HTML at its core is VERY easy to learn.

That hasn't been my experience of trying to help people with it!

Many (even "most") of them come to the web with the pre-conceived
notion that it's DTP, and that the purpose of everything therefore
must be to specify visual results on a computer screen.

To make things worse, this misconception is repeatedly pandered-to by
the purveyors of so-called WYSIWYG authoring software.

They simply cannot grasp the idea of HTML as abstract markup,
available to any kind of presentation and for other (searching,
indexing etc.) purposes.

Accessibility to other kinds of browsing (e.g speaking browser, text
mode browser etc.), once it's been hammered into their consciousness,
they immediately rate as an advanced technique - for which they
consider that their page has no need, and anyway they opine that they
would need to make separate versions of their page for each of these
purposes. For which, of course, they conclude they have no time and
cannot spare the resources, for what they perceive to be a tiny
minority[1]

They simply have no idea, and repeatedly fail to grasp, that this
accessibility is already built into the design, and that what they
need to do is to use it as it was intended.

I am genuinely not exaggerating: I have seen and heard these responses
over and over again. It's only after a long and painful UN-learning
of their preconceptions (which many of them refuse point-blank to even
start on) that they can begin to grasp the ideas of composing one
abstract markup (HTML/XHTML) accompanied by some optional presentation
proposal(s) = stylesheet(s).

that's how it's seemed to me, anyway. best regards.


[1] yes indeed, good search robots really are a tiny minority of web
site visitors, but IMHO rather important visitors for all that.

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