- From: Al Gilman <asgilman@access.digex.net>
- Date: Wed, 22 Oct 1997 13:29:59 -0400 (EDT)
- To: w3c-wai-hc@w3.org (HC team)
All butterflies are insects. But... It is true that the subspaces of a multi-dimensional space form a Boolean algebra. It is true that it is often useful to hid the axes inside a subspace at times and look on a subspace decomposition as a low-order multidimensional space. So using "axis" to refer to a subspace is a reasonable and natural stretch. On the other hand, it is only this Boolean algebra semantic that this attribute shares with AXES. Calling the current attribute AXES is like saying that all boolean algebras are subspace decompositions of multidimensional spaces. The best definition I have come up with for the actual semantics of this attribute are: (for each remote element referenced in AXES) The content of the current cell is a member of a set identified with the content of the referenced element. This definition includes sets satisfying either "various attributes of one entity" or "the same attribute across multiple entities" as is required to cover the significance of the row and column heads respectively in the "Courses in Bath" example. The parallel to AXIS is seen clearly if we state the semantics of AXIS as The content of the current cell is a member of a set identified with the content of the AXIS attribute. "Axes" is a very clear notion to us math geeks, and it is not what we are dealing with here. And the (more narrow) math concept will be something we want to be able to use as a point of reference or analogy in defining future language features for HTML. In order to make the name extend gracefully to MegaZone's design for the OPTION classification scheme, I would like to replace "keep-with" as a suggested replacement name for "axes" and suggest "belongs-to" which is a little stronger in connotation. -- Al
Received on Wednesday, 22 October 1997 13:30:18 UTC