CSS - Accessibility Problem!

On the one hand Accessibility guidelines state that sites should work even if stylesheets fail to load...

... and then on another hand, you're told not to include any style/layout/formatting within an html page - to use the stylesheet instead.

My question is this. Say i create a site which is arranged in the common layout of header at top, nav menu floated to the left, main content sitting on the right, and then footer below.

Should the layout of the div's, namely the float left etc be within the webpage or the stylesheet.

I guess most people will say stylesheet, but that means if the stylesheet fails to load, the site layout will be completely messed up with the content appearing below the nav menu.

Do you make an exception in this case and include some limited layout-style information in the webpage? What are people's opinions on this?

The Q tag is supposed to be used for inline quotations, whereas the BLOCKQUOTE tag for longer quotations. The Q tag is suppose to render quotation marks around the enclosed quote, but does not do so in IE. As far as I known (have read in various articles), IE is the only browser that does not enclose the quote with quotation marks.

I have a single-lined quote I want to display and was hoping to use the Q tag as I don't find it neccessary to use the BLOCKQUOTE tag since it's only a 5-word sentence and the BLOCKQUOTE does not render quotation marks around the data in any browser (instead indents both the left and right margins).

If I were to forget about both tags competely and just enclose my quote with quotation marks it would 'appear' correct, though it does not adhear to accessibility guidelines as a screen-reader browser like JAWS would not realize it is actually a quotation and would read it the same as any other text enclosed in a P tag.

If I were to use the Q tag and add the quotation marks, IE would look right, but in all the other browsers there would be double quotation marks.

Should I de-style the Q tag so the quotation marks do not show? If that is possible I could continue using the appropriate tag and just add the quotation marks manually but it would still look right on all web browsers (including text-only browsers), and it would be read properly. Though, is that even possible? and if it were, is it backwards-compatible or will it only work on recent web browsers?

Another alternative would be to use the BLOCKQUOTE and add the quotations manually and style the BLOCKQUOTE tag accordingly... but again, this is meant for longer quotations, but may be the only reasonable alternative?

OR

style the Q tag to have quotation marks before and after in IE, but IE doesn't support 'content:' correct?

Does anyone know of a solution? or which of my 'fixes' would you suggest?

Thank you.

Edit I was thinking about this more and I think I came up with a pretty good solution:

Code:

q:before, q:after { content:''; }

IE already doesn't display the quotes so it doesn't matter that it doesn't support the above code, the rest of the browsers do (i think?), so I can continue to use the Q tag, whilst adding the quotation marks manually.

Good fix?

I know there is a forum for this, so I will not paste any URL or such without permission (I don't have 30 posts required to even post there, so). I don't want to get banned, etc. for posting something so instead I will simply ask^_^ & say, "Thank you!" for everyone is helpful here & provides a good community (& endless reading material via posts, tutorials etc!).

So, what am I really asking about?

"I've been learning XHTML & CSS as a hobby for the past few weeks & needed something to experiment with; my excuse for this practice takes on the form of a personal webpage (not quite comfortable with my name online, I created a pseudonymous company name).

For this little project, my goal was to be simple: accessible, valid, & XHTML/CSS only (with hopefully no Javascript or as few hacks/filters as possible)."

With that said, it would probably be helpful to actually see my web page to let me know how it's going....but as I said, I don't think it would really belong here (this is not website critique forum & I am not really sure where else to ask since I love this community)

I have tested it's viewability on IE6/win, Opera 9.24, Firefox 2.0.0.11 & Safari 3.0b/win, but I don't have access to a Mac machine, either. It's built to be usable with 800x600 resolution (or viewport) in mind, though I designed it with 1024x768.


Would it be okay if I ask for some of the more experienced designers to take a look at my coding & layouts to make sure everything is on track?

A random thought popped into my head today about whether it matters if a site is fluid or static with regards to accessibility. Wherever possible I do try to design fluid sites but is there anything wrong with a static design if you then add an extra CSS file for handheld devices etc?