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Degrade Gracefully

Some of HTML’s and/or CSS’s features degrade gracefully. I.e. if it says <blink>Hi!</blink> and you don’t have the blink tag you can still read the word “Hi!”, the non-supported tags just go away.

With gemini text we don’t really have the ability to degrade gracefully.

So we need to get the spec absolutely right before we finalize it.

In Gemini, there are basically two levels: support the three advanced types or just support the four basic types.

If you believe this post is in favor of blink or marquee or font-family you are missing the point.

Some of those added features are dumb. Others are good ideas.

Tables Concepts for Accessibility wrote:

People using screen readers can have the row and column headers read aloud as they navigate through the table. Screen readers speak one cell at a time and reference the associated header cells, so the reader doesn’t lose context.

Some people use alternative ways to render the data, for example by using custom stylesheets to display header cells more prominently. Techniques like this enable them to change text size and colors and display the information as lists rather than grids. The table code needs to be properly structured to allow alternative renderings.

This is another reason why I kind of quixotically tilt at people doing asterisks for emphasis. They can’t degrade gracefully. They’re be there in the text if they’re not supported by the client.