Re: Phrase markup (was Re: Aural Cascading Style Sheets)

Dave Raggett wrote:

   I think there is a good case for markup to indicate how to speak
   certain words or phrases, when this also serves to amplify the
   semantics.

I couldn't agree more. The WebSpeak browser does a good job on
interpreting the semantics implied by Hn, OL/UL/DL --> LI/DT/DD, EM,
STRONG etc.

    <acronym for="Cascading Style Sheets">CSS</acronym>
    <abbrev for="etcetera">etc.</abbrev>
    <person fullname="David St.John Raggett">Dave</person>

I like the attributes. The current HTML Pro just uses the HTML3 set,
which I think we expected to use ID/IDREF mechanisms for this, but
your suggestion is much clearer.

   If a name is from a different language then different pronunciation
   rules will apply, this can be handled via the language attribute, e.g.

    <person lang=fr>Jean Fran&ccedil;ois Dupont</person>

Imagine the script for a Pink Panther (movie not toon) in HTML being
spoken using this :-)

   For really hard to pronounce phrases, perhaps its worth considering
   an attribute for specifying the pronunciation using the International
   Phonetic Alphabet. Can anyone give me a lead on how to represent
   IPC characters conveniently using ASCII?  Is there an agreed set
   of SGML entities?  

Yes I think there is, but I don't think it is possible to represent
the chars using ASCII very easily (although maybe the IPC people do
this in email somehow). There is certainly a recognised name for each
character (I think the ipamacs.sty file in the wsuipa font collection
for TeX implements the glyphs by name).

   It would be great to collect suggestions for enlarging the set
   of phrase tags for future versions of HTML. Is there a core
   set that will meet say 95% of people's needs?

The TEI pretty much defined most things you could want to do with
content markup at the basic level. Maybe someone on TEI-L could
suggest a core set for the level of use you describe.

///Peter

Received on Sunday, 19 January 1997 17:55:20 UTC