Re: draft HTML5: Techniques for the provision of text alternatives

Hi Steve,

I agree with Olaf that the Lady of Shalott examples may be problematic.

Poetry markup is an important yet separate issue that Olaf may want to
raise a bug [1] [2] [3] [4] to resolve.

Until the poetry markup issue is decided, perhaps for 6.1 and 6.2 we
could use something like we did for our May 2008 HTMLWG Action 54 [5]:

<!-- Full Recitation of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Poem -->

Then the text alternative issue [6] won't be intertwined with the
poetry markup issue [7].

Best Regards,
Laura

[1] http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html#basic-step-1
[2] http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/createaccount.cgi
[3] http://www.bugzilla.org/docs/3.0/html/using.html
[5] http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/Action54AltAttribute#head-814d07bab27cf5b1e5059b93250952ca7e7e2bcd-3
[6] http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/PoeticSemantics
[7] http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/IssueAltAttribute


On 1/18/10, Dr. Olaf Hoffmann <Dr.O.Hoffmann@gmx.de> wrote:
> I think, the section 6 contains improper markup (and problematic content).
> Poetry or a stanza/strophe is embedded in a p element.
> The current draft of HTML5 as previous versions of HTML notes,
> that p represents a paragraph. Paragraphs are prose and no
> poetry and cannot contain any substructures like strophe-lines.
>
> My suggestion is to use either another format to markup
> literature/text properly or to use divs with RDFa or some other
> mechanism to indicate the role of the divs.
> Especially for a non visual representation it is for many
> people pretty confusing/depressing, if poetry is presented as prose
> (I know this personally, because one of my nephews tends to
> recite poetry much like prose ;o)
>
>
> Another problem may occur with the relation of h1, h2, image
> and stanza. The current order implies more or less, that
> Alfred Lord Tennyson is the author of the poem, the image
> and the alternative text - is this really true?
> Some metadata (RDF) might be necessary to put the
> relations correct.
>
> This problem is only slightly better handled with example 6.2
> due to the hyperlink (not only because it points to an error 404 page).
>
>
> According to wikipedia
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lady_of_Shalott
> the image seems to show a replication
> of an image of John William Waterhouse, not from
> Alfred Lord Tennyson, while the alternative text is maybe
> from another person, what means, it is effectively an
> interpretation of the image, not neccessarily representing
> the intentions of the image author.  Still it can be an alternative
> for the image, however not related directly to the author of
> the poem or the image...
>
> Is there a mechanism currently to relate metadata to the
> value of an attribute like alt? If not, it might be better to
> replace the old img with a new element with the
> possibility to contain the alternative text as element content,
> including metadata about the content ;o)
>
> The sample seems to be already old enough to be public
> domain, therefore it is at least not really problematic for the
> draft to blur all these relations. However, if the sample is
> intended to be useful for current works, one has to put those
> relations somewhere due to copyright restrictions - and even
> without, I think, the works of authors should be always
> honoured by putting the relations correctly.
>
>
> Related discussion about the poetry problem of HTML in the wiki:
> http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/PoeticSemantics
>
>
> Olaf
-- 
Laura L. Carlson

Received on Monday, 18 January 2010 19:20:28 UTC