Philip TAYLOR wrote:

> Dear Colleagues -- A well-intentioned colleague has assiduously
> removed all tables from his $n$-column web pages and is using
> nice clean, valid, (X)HTML + CSS.  However, he is unrepentant
> about his use of (say) <P class="Header"><SPAN class="Important">
> rather than (say) <H1>.  I would be very grateful if a few
> of you could recommend well-argued on-line papers arguing the
> merits of high-level structural markup as opposed to low-level
> markup with all semantic content delegated to meaningful class
> names.

Phil, this is not the right list for this sort of question - probably 
more at home on the W3C Public Evangelist one (Cc'd in on this reply).
However, if I can indulge the list's patience for a second, my short 
statement: consider the extreme case of a blind user with a screen 
reader accessing the site - how is the screen reader supposed to 
understand that his eclectic use of class names actually carries 
meaning? As far as the reader is concerned, it's a paragraph that is no 
different from any other piece of text on that page. And, if this 
colleague is working on an ac.uk site, it's worth reminding him that 
proper use of (structural) markup is included in the WCAG 1.0 
guidelines, and under DDA/SENDA he should really be following those 
guidelines.

P
-- 
Patrick H. Lauke
__________________________________________________________
re·dux (adj.): brought back; returned. used postpositively
[latin : re-, re- + dux, leader; see duke.]
www.splintered.co.uk | www.photographia.co.uk
http://redux.deviantart.com 
__________________________________________________________
Web Standards Project (WaSP) Accessibility Task Force
http://webstandards.org/ 
__________________________________________________________