- From: Florian Rivoal via GitHub <sysbot+gh@w3.org>
- Date: Wed, 27 Mar 2019 03:25:29 +0000
- To: public-css-archive@w3.org
> Exposing 𝕸, as "M" rather than "mathematical bold fraktur capital M" is wrong. It's very common in math text to use the same letter with different "style" to convey different meanings, so we really want all users to be able to distinguish them. In that case, the difference should be preserved even when css isn't applied, and so it should be in the document itself, not in its CSS. Removing css from a document is a thing that happens (bad network, reader mode, search engine crawler, same data in an RSS feed…), and it should not modify document semantics. Authors should not rely on css for document semantics. So the question is not whether "𝕸" should be read as "M", but whether "M" should be read as "M" when it's been styled to look like "𝕸". When authors actually mean 𝕸 and not "M styled to look like 𝕸", they should put 𝕸 in the document. Just because CSS has selectors and selectors are a convenient generic mechanism doesn't make CSS into the right mechanism for solving all kinds of problems. > text-transform is a grey area, IMO. On one hand, it can cause weirdness for speech. On the other, if someone chose to render something a certain way visually in a particular view of the text, they clearly did that for a reason. Braille in particular tries to provide a mapping to prevalent visual text features. Braille has indicators for capitalisation, bold, italics, etc. You'll note that these are not called emphasis, strong emphasis, etc.; they are not purely semantic. When we talk about accessibility, we cannot think about speech alone. To me, this just means that braille terminals are capable of applying some styling, so they should look at CSS to decide what styling to apply. The point is not that styling is useless. It certainly isn't, and assistive technologies should style things to the extent they can given their particular constraints. But things that must remain even when styling is dropped should be in the document, not in css. > Puristically, it's tempting to say that CSS is purely for styling and nothing else. In reality, that isn't entirely true any more in the real world. I'm not a purist about this. I think the line between style and not style is sometimes fuzzy, particularly around UI/UX things. But "if you don't apply this bit of CSS, the meaning of the document changes and becomes wrong or misleading" is a very strong sign that CSS is the wrong tool for the job. "It's hard to type" is an argument for a better IME or a better processor. Not for new features in CSS. -- GitHub Notification of comment by frivoal Please view or discuss this issue at https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/3745#issuecomment-476955071 using your GitHub account
Received on Wednesday, 27 March 2019 03:25:30 UTC