Re: W3C recommends: Avoid ASCII Art

Dave Bird---St Hippo of Augustine (Dev...@xemu.demon.co.uk) wrote:
: In art<6bhpv4$2js$1...@tron.sci.fi>, Ilmari Karonen <ilt...@sci.fi> writes
: >Lennert Stock (lst...@lstock.demon.nl) wrote:
: >: Read on http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/WD-WAI-PAGEAUTH-0203.html, the
: >: World Wide Web Consortium's new Web Accessibility Initiative Draft
: >: Guidelines:
: >:
: >: >6.[RECOMMENDED] 
: >: >Avoid ASCII art. Replace it with an image and alternative text.
: >: >Common typographic characters or constructions to be avoided are
: >: >emoticons, arrows consisting of dashes and greater than
: >: >signs (e.g., -->), etc.

: Perhaps someone should reply if they are looking for comment?
: All they mean is  "Do not mix ascii-art into ordinary HTNL text
: (such drawings belong in separate preformatted blocks), because it
: may clash with HTML elements:  smileys :-> and arrows --> using
: the greaterthan sign are particularly disruptive.  Replace them with
: an image and alternative text."

No, I don't think that's it. The document from which the excerpt is taken
is about making web pages accessible to people with disabilities etc.
Ascii art doesn't do well on a non-textual medium. It sounds horrible
when read by a speech synthetizer, and I suspect it appears no better on
a braille terminal. And of course, search engines are effectively blind,
so the same considerations apply.

What they mean is "Using ascii art on pages may make then inaccessible
to blind readers." Arrows are fine from an HTML point of view, as long
as you remember to use &gt; and &lt;.

  --&gt; like this &lt;--

One-line ascii pics such as smileys are merely the most common ones.
Read the whole document before commenting on it, please. (Near the end it
specifically advises against using <PRE> for tables and such.)

--
 .    _, .. j u s t.  h o w l.i n g   i n  .t h e   n.i g h t .. ._,   .
,    )''        .       /\_    .     '     ,/\   .          ,    ``(  ,
_\__/ |__.'\._______,--;_'_`-.___,.______,/_,_`.__,-.__'__,/`-._,_| \____
 ,_f_)\. Ilmari Karonen  ilt...@sci.fi  http://www.sci.fi/~iltzu/  /(_|_,.

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  ,  ,  , , ,
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(    )
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(0::0)
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/ \/ \

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