RE: RDF and CSS - was last calls for css3-background, css3-fonts, css21

 I will try to rexplain what I was thinking.

My problem was that presention , for the most part, has content.
The content may be "this is emphasised" or "you can trust this", or who
knows what, but it is content. That content is lost with overriding user
style sheets.

A strong example of this is background grafics which may even  have text in.

Now, one way to deal with this would be to add discripitve atributes to all
CSS elements, and emphasis levels and similar fun stuff. In other words a
way to extract the content from the presentation.

If we could do it in RDF that would be cooler. We leave CSS alone and say:
this class, from this CSS file, has an emphasis level of "extremely
irrelevant".
 This class, from this CSS file, has an  association of "trustworthy"
This class, from this CSS file, has an  association of "urgent/dangerous"

Now visually "urgent" may be rendered in red. but in a black and white
rendering it may have a box around it, in aural it may be louder. - up to
the user.

Alternatively, when linking a document to a CSS file we could also link it
to the RDF that explains or gives meaning to the CSS classes as used and
quoted by the document.


ok hear is the one that was confusing :
This class (td.header for example), from this CSS file, is similar in our
data model to a  "H1 from XHTML"
In other words, give Peaple an elegant way out of their misuse of  XHTML and
phudo classes

I am not an "RDF person" (although you probably could describe me in lots of
conflicting RDF definitions)
But I am guessing that may be an elegant solution to a voice but none the
less real problem.

All the best,

Lisa Seeman

UnBounded Access

Widen the World Web

http://www.UBaccess.com



-----Original Message-----
From: wai-xtech-request@w3.org [mailto:wai-xtech-request@w3.org]On
Behalf Of Sean B. Palmer
Sent: Thursday, August 01, 2002 11:01 AM
To: wai-xtech@w3.org; Al Gilman
Subject: Re: RDF and CSS - was last calls for css3-background,
css3-fonts, css21



[...]
> I believe that the leading-candidate method of applying the RDF which
> associates a description of the background is not by reference via
> CSS path into the CSS at all but by the URI of the first-class web
> object that the CSS processor binds as background to some base-language
> element.

Yep; I was thinking about applying the RDF solution more broadly, i.e. by
extending it to annotate other bits of style (why I chose this background
color: what it means, where I derived the style from, what date I updated
this particular rule, why this bit doesn't work in a particular browser,
etc.). In doing so, and because I'm a metahead and forgot to KIS (S!), I
forgot about just talking about a particular image being used as a
background. I guess that the "background-longdesc" property could easily
point off to some XML/RDF as much as it could point to some further HTML.

[...]
> > As for "associate td.header with a standard  h2", I'm not 100%
> > sure what you mean, but I think you're in the realm of CSS
> > pre-processing.
>
> Pre-processing, but not necessarily CSS pre-processing.
> Perhaps XSLT pre-processing.  One application is to generate a new
> base-language syntax tree for an NN4-compatible view of the page.
> I don't believe that CSS will do that for you.

You'd have to run the majority of pages through Tidy before you could do
anything with XSLT, of course. I'm still not quite sure what Lisa (or you)
mean, to be quite honest. Most of the problems in NN4's display of HTML+CSS
is in the CSS engine's inability to do anything correctly. Changing the
HTML structure is not going to fix it, unless you take out all of the class
hooks or something.

I was thinking that she means "using the browser's built in h2 style for
all td.header selected elements", which would go beyond simple
pre-processing, in fact, requiring knowledge of the browser's built in
style sheet.

--
Kindest Regards,
Sean B. Palmer
@prefix : <http://purl.org/net/swn#> .
:Sean :homepage <http://purl.org/net/sbp/> .

Received on Sunday, 4 August 2002 08:23:05 UTC