Re: draft HTML5: Techniques for the provision of text alternatives

I think, the section 6 contains improper markup (and problematic content).
Poetry or a stanza/strophe is embedded in a p element.
The current draft of HTML5 as previous versions of HTML notes,
that p represents a paragraph. Paragraphs are prose and no
poetry and cannot contain any substructures like strophe-lines.

My suggestion is to use either another format to markup
literature/text properly or to use divs with RDFa or some other
mechanism to indicate the role of the divs. 
Especially for a non visual representation it is for many
people pretty confusing/depressing, if poetry is presented as prose
(I know this personally, because one of my nephews tends to 
recite poetry much like prose ;o)


Another problem may occur with the relation of h1, h2, image
and stanza. The current order implies more or less, that 
Alfred Lord Tennyson is the author of the poem, the image
and the alternative text - is this really true?
Some metadata (RDF) might be necessary to put the
relations correct.

This problem is only slightly better handled with example 6.2 
due to the hyperlink (not only because it points to an error 404 page).


According to wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lady_of_Shalott
the image seems to show a replication
of an image of John William Waterhouse, not from 
Alfred Lord Tennyson, while the alternative text is maybe 
from another person, what means, it is effectively an
interpretation of the image, not neccessarily representing
the intentions of the image author.  Still it can be an alternative
for the image, however not related directly to the author of
the poem or the image...

Is there a mechanism currently to relate metadata to the
value of an attribute like alt? If not, it might be better to
replace the old img with a new element with the
possibility to contain the alternative text as element content,
including metadata about the content ;o)

The sample seems to be already old enough to be public
domain, therefore it is at least not really problematic for the 
draft to blur all these relations. However, if the sample is 
intended to be useful for current works, one has to put those 
relations somewhere due to copyright restrictions - and even 
without, I think, the works of authors should be always 
honoured by putting the relations correctly.


Related discussion about the poetry problem of HTML in the wiki:
http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/PoeticSemantics


Olaf

Received on Monday, 18 January 2010 17:28:27 UTC