Marking up links to alternative versions of content (was: Re: conflation of issues or convergence of interests?)

On Jul 30, 2007, at 03:32, Sander Tekelenburg wrote:

> I can consume both the
> text and the audio, but only deduce that they're equivalents by  
> consuming
> both. There is zero indication that they are equivalents.

The simplest possible way of addressing this issue without needing  
any changes to HTML and without any new browser UI would be adding a  
sentence immediately after the links to slides and the audio and  
briefly state what information they provide that isn't on the  
transcript page. (Or in the title attribute to make sure that the  
sentence gets associated with the link if the user uses an UA mode  
that only examines links and no surrounding text.)

Does the relationship really need to be expressed in markup as  
opposed to natural-language text in the *immediate* vicinity of the  
link? Would an expression in markup capture (in a way the UA can  
reasonably expose--even in the usual visual CSS situation) the reason  
*why* the author thought it was worthwhile to provide non-text (to a  
degree sufficient for the user to make a decision on which version to  
get or to figure out what (s)he is missing)?

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Monday, 30 July 2007 09:27:26 UTC