- From: <bugzilla@jessica.w3.org>
- Date: Thu, 02 Sep 2010 20:30:55 +0000
- To: public-html-bugzilla@w3.org
http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=10455 --- Comment #70 from Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis <bhawkeslewis@googlemail.com> 2010-09-02 20:30:52 --- (In reply to comment #67) > supporting author ignorance by simply telling them "copy-and-paste" this markup > into your content if X equals Y is a HORRENDOUS idea -- the point of native > semantics is to be easily understood and implemented by developers and authors > alike -- telling authors to use pre-canned snippets of HTML+RDFa is a complete > non-starter -- HTML should NOT be encouraging authors to copy-and-paste > snippets of code without the author/content creator understanding how that code > works, how it is expressed by a UA or assistive technology, and how to tailor > that code to the content creator's needs... > supporting author ignorance by simply telling them "copy-and-paste" this > markup into your content if X equals Y is a HORRENDOUS idea -- the point of > native semantics is to be easily understood and implemented by developers and > authors alike -- telling authors to use pre-canned snippets of HTML+RDFa is > a complete non-starter -- HTML should NOT be encouraging authors to > copy-and-paste snippets of code without the author/content creator > understanding how that code works, how it is expressed by a UA or assistive > technology, and how to tailor that code to the content creator's needs... Authors operate at varying levels of abstraction. It seems to me that most authors operate at a high level of (doubtless highly leaky) abstraction and don't understand how HTML "works" beyond the level of inserting "a", "b" and "i" tags and expecting the browser to link and render the text accordingly. If you literally tell authors to copy and paste code with no explanation whatsoever, then of course they will fail. If you tell them what parts of the code they need to change and why, they may well achieve their goal (in this case, associating images with long descriptions) without understanding every detail of how it works (in this case, how bytes are converted into characters which are parsed into a DOM, from which N-triples are extracted, some of which are selected to be mapped into MSAA in the "accDescription" field, on the basis of which JAWS will notify the user a long description is present and allow the user to open the long description in a new window). For example, you could give authors a hidden long description recipe as follows: - Create a separate HTML page containing your long description. Identify your "img" element with a unique "id" attribute (e.g. "my-image") - Put an empty "span" element beside it to hold machine-readable information about how to locate the long description. - Set the "resource" attribute of the "span" to the URL of the long - description. Set the "about" attribute of the "span" to reference the - "img" element (not the image source) by fragment URL by putting a hash sign before the "id" value (e.g. "#my-image"). - Set the "rel" attribute of the span to "longdesc" to indicate the resource is a long description for the subject of the "about" attribute (i.e. the "img" element). Note how the Facebook Open Graph documentation does not attempt to explain to authors the mysteries of how the Open Graph annotations are converted to N-triples, and concentrates on explaining to authors what the various properties mean. Given WG opposition to retaining "longdesc" and given uncertainty about the direction ARIA will take, I'm trying to assess Laura's assertion that "HTML5 fails to adequately provide" Requirements 1-6 by looking at whether HTML5 and sister technologies (specifically ARIA and HTML+RDFa) can meet these requirements or not. It seems to me that while these technologies do not (and I would argue should not) mandate user interface, they can be used to express the semantics of associating a long description with an image and enable the building of user interfaces meeting the stated requirements. (At any rate, nobody has demonstrated that they cannot.) I do not dispute that simpler features are preferable, and will see higher adoption. -- Configure bugmail: http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are the QA contact for the bug.
Received on Thursday, 2 September 2010 20:30:57 UTC