content categories and user stylesheet understanding

At 12:54 PM 11/25/99 -0500, Nir Dagan wrote:
>At 09:18 AM 11/25/99 -0800, Scott Luebking wrote:
>>Hi, Charles
>>
>>The problem is that user style sheets do not understand
>>concepts / subject material.  The combination of knowledge of subject
>>material and of user can significantly affect layout.
>>
>>For example, results from seach engines often have links for next page
>>of search results and previous page of search results.   These links are
>>usually at the end of the search results.  However, for a blind user the
>>better solution is to have these links at the top of the page so the
>>blind user doesn't have to read though the search results.  
>
>And why would anyone want to skip unread search results? The first results
are
>supposed to be more relevant.

They are not necessarily unread.  One could have moved back two pages in
error, and need to move forward one page to get to the page bearing the
link that one wants to re-visit.  Charles's comment is correct in terms of
maintaining a convenient capability for hierarchical motion, and web pages
in slidesets often have next/previous buttons at the top as well as at the
foot.

>An even
>>better solution for blind users is to tie the links to a keys so  that
>>the blind user can jump to the next page of results no matter where
>>he/she is on the page. 
>
>HTML has several solutions for that. One is the accesskey attribute.
>Also the <link rel=next> maybe used for navigating to the next in the 
>sequence page. For going back, all browsers have a "previous page" key.
>
> The user style sheet will not understand the
>>purpose of these links.
>
>But HTML can.

Anything HTML can understand, the user stylesheet can understand by using
selectors keyed to the HTML namespace.

The purpose of the parts of a document can be understood by the user
stylesheet if the XML, CLASS and REL terms used are drawn from a schema
published earlier and used in writing the user stylesheet.

We have somehow to get an abstract definition of the purpose of the
varieties of content in the page.  The originating author does not
understand the best possible use of the User Interface media for the
particular user who is browsing the content, and we want to have
technological support for graceful transformation of the content into a
presentation that is tailored to the specific needs of the user.

To get that, we need meaningful terms used in XML element and attribute
names and values and/or HTML CLASS and REL attribute values.  By
meaningful, I mean the tokens relate to meanings that stylesheet-writers
can depend on.

This can be achieved by schemas published and adhered to, or it can be
achieved by loosing media critics on the current web content and using a
schema language to express the current idioms as documented from observation.

The latter is technically harder, but probably easier to achieve sooner
than performing the "herding cats" task of getting millions of autonomous
web authors to follow our set of rules.

Al

>
>===================================
>Nir Dagan
>Assistant Professor of Economics
>Brown University 
>Providence, RI
>USA
>
>http://www.nirdagan.com
>mailto:nir@nirdagan.com
>tel:+1-401-863-2145
>

Received on Friday, 26 November 1999 08:55:04 UTC