[uf-dev] Displaying hidden microformat in Operator (and elsewhere)

[Martin Sarsale]

On Nov 7, 2007 7:45 PM,  <paul_wilkins at xtra.co.nz> wrote:
> From: Martin Sarsale <martin at malditainternet.com>
> > IMHO it's a similar problem with screen readers and image replacement
> > techniques. (
> > http://www.alistapart.com/articles/fir/ )
>
> 456 Bera Street deals with the issue in todays article
> http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200711/screen_readers_sometimes_ignore_displaynone/
>
> <quote>
> The simple workaround [. . .] is to use both display:none and visibility:hidden:

ok, that's the easy case, when you DON'T want content to be read/displayed.
now, the other case is the difficult one: "how do you do to style
content that is related to the current document but you don't want it
to be displayed raw" (maybe replaced by a image).

In that case, visibility:hidden makes a lot of sense.

AFAIK that is a "problem" of screen readers, they represent the
interest of a minority (handicapped people) and they try to do their
best to make inaccessible websites accessible. The "right" way to do
this, is to create stylesheets for screen and speech @media types (see
http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/media.html#media-types). Screen Readers
shouldn't be messing with styles designed to for visual screens!
If screen readers were using the correct stylesheet ("speech") display
would be the only rule they have to obey
http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/visuren.html#display-prop (visibility is
only for visual media types!)

Now, since Microformats are a "new thing" and Mike with his (great)
Operator is setting the 'standard' (since, AFAIK, with FF3 it will be
the first massive product supporting MF) I would like it to be done
"right": "display:none" is ignored, "visibility:hidden" is shown in
Operator.

Guys that forgot that HTML was designed to markup documents and are
creating applications with it ( 99%of us ;) ) will learn that when you
want to "show some microformat which was hidden before" you have to
set "display:block" AND "visibility:visible".