Re: print page number /= current page number in Braille paginatio n.

Al Gilman writes:

 > Consider an etext scenario, where material is primarily published
 > in print but transcribed to online media for accessibility.  Here
 > the print page number is a valuable point of reference because
 > most people using the same text index it in that way.  This is
 > true not only of books but also periodicals.

Right. When you refer to a fixed, rendered version of the document it
certainly makes sense to use page numbers as a reference. We then face
two problems:

 1 how are the page references encoded?
 2 how is the rendered version referred to?

The first problem can be solved e.g. with an INDEX attribute in HTML
(or XML, of course). One possible solution to the second problem is to
use the "ALTERNATE" value for the "REL" attibute on LINK [1]. It is
currently described as:

  Alternate: Designates substitute versions for the document in which
  the link occurs. When used together with the lang attribute, it
  implies a translated version of the document. When used together with
  the media attribute, it implies a version designed for a different
  medium (or media).

An example of use:

  <LINK REL=ALTERNATE MEDIA=print HREF="doc.ps">

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-html40/struct/links.html#linktype

 > Here, the printed version is not generated from the HTML and it's
 > not the job of CSS to get the numbers into the HTML.  That is an
 > authoring/transcribing tool job.  But in the etext scenario it is
 > still desirable to be able to support this information.  I am not
 > eager to ignore its value, if we can support it easily.

As you note, CSS is not the main responsible. What CSS must offer is
a way to insert values from attributes into the presentation of the
document. This is currently no in CSS2, but we hope it will be there
soon.

One question: In braille printouts, is it customary to put these page
references into into a running header or into the text flow? Is there
other conventions in braille printing we should be aware of?

Regards,

-h&kon

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Received on Saturday, 8 November 1997 09:53:35 UTC