Re: Subsumation

> Illustrating appropriately is easily thought of as including alt
> text for images and all the caption/summary/description/+

I often wonder what the appropriate text alternative would be for a GIF of
the Mona Lisa or some similar masterpiece: alt="[Girl Kind-of Smiling]".
Sometimes I really don't think there are decent text alternatives for
images... but it depends on the image. The more complex the image, the
longer the non-mdeia dependant alternative is.

> And of course the roots of "depiction" infer evoking a "mental
> image" of something. That mental image is actually a lower level
> of abstraction from the sub-verbal level of semantics and is what
> communicating is about.

What was Leonardo trying to put across with the Mona Lisa? What was John
Lennon trying to describe with "Strawberry Fields Forever"? Should deaf
people have a non-musical equivalent for an embedded MP3 of Strawberry
Fields? What would it be: a picture of John Lennon in a tree over some
Strawberry Fields, along with a copy of the lyrics?

The problem with guidelines is that they constrict and deny creativity.
They deny the myriad situations that occur in a hypermedia Web. Human
creativity is a subtle thing, and someimtes with years of analysis you can
be no closer to undetrstanding the mind of the author... and yet we make
this a requirement? Please...

Kindest Regards,
Sean B. Palmer
@prefix : <http://infomesh.net/2001/01/n3terms/#> .
[ :name "Sean B. Palmer" ] has :homepage <http://infomesh.net/sbp/> .

Received on Saturday, 13 January 2001 13:10:31 UTC