Re: HTML5 script start tag should select appropriate content model according to src

Patrick H. Lauke wrote:
> 
> Henri Sivonen wrote:
> 
>> It's the same thing on other visual media, including screens, when the 
>> semantics are presented by italicizing. It's not like J. Random reader 
>> views source to see if a given run of text was marked up as <i>, <em>, 
>> <cite>, <dfn> or <var>.
> 
> ...
> 
>  > If the UA doesn't present the distinctions to the reader, marking up
>  > semantics is useless as far as the human reader is concerned.
> 
> So, it's a shortcoming in user agent support. Moving beyond the visual, 
> screen readers for instance can (depending on settings) differentiate 
> between <i> and <em>, and treat them differently (the latter resulting 
> in a change of volume and/or inflection of the spoken output).
> 
>> It isn't particularly useful to try to make moral right/wrong 
>> arguments about the behavior of Web authors on the aggregate. To get 
>> the masses do something, there need to be good incentives. There's no 
>> point in bearing the cost of marking everything up diligently if there 
>> isn't a payoff that is reasonable compared to the cost.
>>
>> Honestly, I can't make the case to my mother why she should bother to 
>> mark up anything as <cite> instead of just pressing command-i in 
>> Dreamweaver.
> 
> The masses will use authoring tools/environments. As long as those tools 
> offer access to <i>, but not to the more semantic alternatives, it's 
> obviously futile to expect the masses to use more appropriate markup.

Whilst its certainly true that the average author fails to use semantic 
features, I think it is also true that many authors would actually 
consider them undesirable as they don't want their pages to be machine 
processable (except by search engines, of course).  Machine processing 
can allow the extraction of commercially valuable information and can 
strip the content of its emotive context, and revenue generating 
advertising.

You can see some of this with Acrobat Reader.  They had to add a special 
permission to allow access by assistive technology when copy and paste 
was denied.

Received on Monday, 23 April 2007 22:04:47 UTC