At 10:12 29/10/02 +0000, you wrote:
>Hi all,
>I'm putting together a proposal to convert our website to use css and xhtml
>(including for layout) to improve accessibility

i believe that standard-compliant code using css and xhtml is the first and
most important step to accessibility.  yes, there is more to accessibility
than that but it's the best way to provide user control over presentation
and to ensure that pages 'transform gracefully'.

>and move away form having to
>maintain a separate text-only site (the site currently uses tables for
>layout).

tables are not all bad (zeldman admitted as much recently) as long as they
degrade gracefully, i.e. make sense linearized, and aren't nested several
levels deep.
opera lets you turn tables off.
if you use tables wisely they will make sense in lynx.

all my sites now use xhtml and i've been using css for years.  i don't use
it for positioning much because a good percentage of my target audience are
netscape 4.7 users.  i still use tables for layout but i don't nest them at
all.

i have, however, just put my first public tableless layout online.  it's a
very simple design for a small website.  it uses only one stylesheet, no
special accommodations for nn 4.7, but it does work in that browser. have a
look if you want: http://www.nado.ac.uk/ .  i still have to tweak it a bit,
though.
something more elaborate will need a second stylesheet.  or one just has to
start treating netscape 4.7 as the old, non-standard-compliant browser that
it is and let the pages degrade to a linearized form.

check out wired.com for an elaborate example.  they've just converted to
css/xhtml and can be proud of it.  check it in nn4.7 to see that some are
not afraid to file it under 'old browsers'.  they say that 14% of their
users will get the unstyled version.

>I'd be very interested to hear any experiences of such a conversion
>- timescales, problems, internal/external resistance to the changes, etc. so
>I know what to anticipate!

converting from html 4 to xhtml is easy.  if you use a xhtml transitional
doctype it will even forgive the odd deprecated element that might still be
floating about in your code.  i did some massive 'search and replace's
(make a site backup first!), converting all tags and attributes to
lowercase, making sure all attribute values are in quotation marks, and
adding the closing slash to all tags that don't have closing tags (br,
meta, link...).  finding and changing all the img tags was a bit
labour-intensive but otherwise converting to xhtml was a fairly quick process.

however, if you plan to use css for presentation and positioning you will
have to do much more than just update the existing code.  you'll have to
get rid of all the font and table tags (are we talking about qaa.ac.uk?),
replace tables with divs and create a stylesheet for the presentational
mark-up and the positioning of the divs.  that will take quite a bit
longer, of course.

>Is anyone else going down this route to comply
>with accessibility legislation?

absolutely.  but not just because of legislation.

to summarize:  great courageous effort.  go for it!

iris


DEMOS Webmaster
<http://www.demos.ac.uk/>
<mailto:[log in to unmask]>