Re: Multimodal Style Sheets

On Mon, 4 Mar 1996, Raman T. V. wrote:

> Only caveat: from personal experience in  implementing AsTeR and powerful ways
> of rendering rich information aurally, especially mathematics,
> I'm stil a bit sceptical about  whether we can in fact avoid escaping into
> unimodal styles.
> The primary difficulty with audio is that once you start dealing with
> information that is more structured e.g. mathematics, rendering order in the
> aural domain is no longer defined by the left to right, up to down ordering of
> the visual presentation.

I think that the best answer to the problem above is to provide more 
expressive markup language.  If html mathematics markup tags express only 
visual cues (e.g., superscript), then multimodal presentation will be a 
difficult.  However, if there are more meaningful tags (e.g., power or 
suptype), multimodal presentation will be better, and authors can be 
easily taught to use them instead.  

In physics, for example, the major journals all accept marked-up papers 
for publication, and after the initial adjustment most people are very 
happy with that.  The additional markup work eliminates a lot of tedious 
proof-reading, because the printer now knows the intention of the author 
much more accurately and thus makes many fewer mistakes.  Thus, serious 
authors are likely to make good use of richer markup if it is available 
to them (and I doubt that many people would want to spend much time 
reading mathematics, or any similarly rich text, from a non-serious author). 

I agree with your skepticism, and I think that the best way to solve the 
problem is by providing better multimodal document styles and more 
expressive markup.  I'm glad you liked the idea of multimodal style, and 
I hope you'll contribute to it.

Regards,

David

Work: seibert@hep.physics.mcgill.ca         Home: 6420 36th Ave.
Physics Department, McGill University       Montreal, PQ, H1T 2Z5 
3600 Univ. St., Mtl., PQ, H3A 2T8, Canada   Canada
(514) 398-6496; FAX: (514) 398-3733         (514) 255-5965

Received on Tuesday, 5 March 1996 11:07:14 UTC