Extending DPub with new roles floating boxes and references?

Hi all,

I'm Silvio Peroni from University of Bologna, and I'm one of the contributors of RASH, the Research Article in Simplified HTML format, available on github at http://github.com/essepuntato/rash, that has been already used in academic events (e.g., SAVE-SD 2015, http://cs.unibo.it/save-sd/2015/index.html).

The new version of RASH that will be released in the next 7 days, together with all its tools (visualisation, conversion, enhancement), will introduce some important features. The main one, in my opinion, is the fact that it is more HTML5-oriented and all the structural roles will be now provided by means of the attribute @role according to the value specified in:

[DPub] Digital Publishing WAI-ARIA Module 1.0 – W3C Editor's Draft. https://rawgit.com/w3c/aria/master/aria/dpub.html

I have few questions for you on this topic.


# Structural roles for floating boxes

In RASH there exist four different kinds of floating boxes (specified through the element "figure"), i.e.: figure box, table box, formula box, and listing box. As you can image, these are used to define referenceable boxes like it happens in other document-oriented languages such as LaTeX, ODT, etc.

In the version of RASH that will publish soon, these are specified by using the following roles (still by means of the attribute @role on "figure" elements): "picture", "table", "formula" and "listing", e.g.:

<figure id="figure_1" role="picture">
 <p>
  <img src="img/rash.png" alt="The RASH logo!"/>
 </p>
 <figcaption>Caption of the figure.</figcaption>
</figure>

There is the possibility of adding some particular and official role in [DPub] that enables one to handle these specific structures?

Note that the disambiguation based on the content of "figure" can not hold sometimes, if, for instance, I want to express similar boxes with different kinds of contents. In RASH, that is the case of formulas, that can be expressed by means of either MathML or images, i.e.:

<figure id="formula_1" role="formula">
 <p>
  <img src="img/formula.png" alt="[a + b]^260 + [a + b]_i"/>
 </p>
</figure>

and

<figure id="formula_1" role="formula">
 <p>
  <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML">
   <mrow>
    <msup>
     <mfenced open="[" close="]">
      <mrow>
       <mi>a</mi>
       <mo>+</mo>
       <mi>b</mi>
      </mrow>
     </mfenced>
     <mn>260</mn>
    </msup>
    <mo>+</mo>
    <msub>
     <mfenced open="{" close="}">
      <mrow>
       <mi>a</mi>
       <mo>+</mo>
       <mi>b</mi>
      </mrow>
     </mfenced>
     <mi>i</mi>
    </msub>
   </mrow>
  </math>
 </p>
</figure>


# References to document objects (e.g., sections)

While in [DPub] there are roles for referring to footnotes (doc-noteref) and bibliographic entries (doc-biblioref), I've not found any role for pointing to other meaningful document components, such as sections, figures, formulas, tables and listings. RASH is using the ad-hoc role "ref" specified on the element "a", as shown in the following excerpt:

<p>In <a href="#metadata" role="ref"></a> we explain how to specify the metadata of the article as appropriate elements within <code>head</code>, while the rest of the document mainly pertains elements within the element <code>body</code>.</p>

...

<section id="metadata">
 <h1>Metadata</h1>
 <p>...</p>
</section>

What such "a" element with "ref" role creates is a specific link/reference to an existing object (a section in this case) that will be then rendered as, for instance, "Section 2" in the browser. 

This role seems to behave like the other references included in [DPub] (i.e., "doc-biblioref" and "doc-noteref"). What about adding a generic "ref" for dealing with references to other kinds of objects?

--------------

What do you think about these issues?

Have a nice day :-)

S.


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Silvio Peroni, Ph.D.
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of Bologna, Bologna (Italy)
Tel: +39 051 2094871
E-mail: silvio.peroni@unibo.it
Web: http://www.essepuntato.it
Twitter: essepuntato