Help with XMl, HTML and Javascript

[zumojuice]

it degrades into a accessible document? do you not want it to be accessible?

[Joe.Morgan]

Hi Carl,

As you correctly mentioned in your post over on the Web dev forum, it is for my university work. I am currently on a gap year studying from distance with no learning material apart from what I can find on the web. So needless to say I am struggling a bit. There were four parts to my assignment:

Plain XML, XML with XSLT, XML to HTML with javascript and styling with CSS, XML to Flash.

XSLT and XML to flash I managed to learn and complete without to much trouble but after about a week of searching and experimenting I just could not get my head around the XML to HTML with javascript.

Thanks for all your help though.

Joe

[scriptage]

Hi Joe,

Quirks mode has a good introduction to the Document Object Model: JavaScript - W3C DOM - Introduction. You can also just google the term and get countless references that will show you different ways to do what you need to: document object model - Google Search

The trick is knowing what to search for :)

If you need any more help the guys over at webdeveloper will be more than willing to explain things, although sometimes they tend to tell you what you should be doing instead of what you want to do; so it would be imperative that you told them it was for an assignment.

As a general rule you should never use Javascript to display data, the content needs to be accessible to everybody that accesses your website, not a lot of courses show you how to achieve that so it can be a bit of a learning curve in the real world.

If you haven't looked into it then this is a good starting place: All You Need For Accessibility - Tutorials, Tools, Books, Validators, etc (Part II) - WebDeveloper.com

Kind Regards

Carl

P.S (zumojuice)

it degrades into a accessible document? do you not want it to be accessible?

The whole idea of "degrading" a document means stripping away a layer of functionality but maintaining content semantics, i.e., in the previous example:

An XSL stylesheet transforms an XML document into an XHTML document.

The document is styled so that the name of the country is displayed above the text describing the country's oil production using divs.

The Javascript then iterates through all of the divs changing the colour of the country names, hides the descriptions and sets a function to toggle the visibility of the descriptions.

The document will now be accessible to those without Javascript as the extra functionality was added on a seperate layer above the document format i.e., the only time content is changed (hidden in this case) is when the browser can handle Javascript.

To make this even more accessible the XSL transformation should be done server side.

[Mack]

FCOL.

I should have realized there was 3 pages here before i just made up the html page to help you out.
my bad for not getting back to you sooner, i see you've got the problem fixed.