Re: W3C recommends: Avoid ASCII Art

On 8 Feb 1998 18:06:30 GMT, ilt...@sci.fi (Ilmari Karonen) wrote:

>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;.

Making them 'accessible' by turning the ASCII pictures into images
would have the benefit of total font control.
Besides that, I can only think of negatives.. there's a large amount of
'defeating the purpose' in here, images are slower to load, etc.

In the long term theoretical kind of way the W3C excels in, what would
perhaps be interesting is the CSS solution. Define a class for visual
clients, e.g. 'asciiartclass', then <SPAN> the ASCII art with it.

-- 
Lennert Stock
lst...@lstock.demon.nl
ASCII Art Hideout!
http://www.lstock.demon.nl/aas.html