[Bug 12985] HTML 5 and IPA TTS

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=12985

Jukka K. Korpela <jukka.k.korpela@kolumbus.fi> changed:

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--- Comment #2 from Jukka K. Korpela <jukka.k.korpela@kolumbus.fi> 2011-06-28 04:29:36 UTC ---
(In reply to comment #1)

> What are you using the data-ipa attribute *for*, then?  If it's currently not
> being used for anything, and you're simply suggesting that it might be a good
> idea for some future time when you might add something that takes advantage of
> it, then it's probably not a good idea to add anything to the language yet.

Describing pronunciation information is as such declarative, and it has the
obvious potential use that speech-based user agents could use the information.
>From the perspective of authoring and markup language, this is sufficient for
asking for a _language-defined_ method for providing the information.

> We
> don't know what the best approach is, because nobody's experimented with things
> yet and discovered what works and what doesn't.

The problem here is that there is considerable confusion even regarding the
nature of pronunciation information - does it belong to content and markup, or
to style sheets? Is the information to be provided for a few individual
occurrences of words, or for words in general in a vocabulary-like manner? And
so on.

There is a discussion of approaches pronunciation information at
http://www.w3.org/html/wg/wiki/PronunciationSemantics
marked as related to ISSUE-49 (of something) and as CLOSED in 2008.

Despite the complexity of the topic, there is a fairly simple (and even
obvious) possible approach: add an attribute, applicable to all elements,
defined to contain the IPA presentation of the intended pronunciation of the
textual content. If this becomes used by authors and utilized by browsing and
other software, then new complexity (like allowing other phonetic notation
systems as well, or specifying a way to indicate that a given pronunciation is
to apply to all occurrences of a word) could be added later.

I'm sceptical of the practical usefulness of the idea. Few authors would feel
the need to provide pronunciation information, and even fewer would provide it
correctly (in the sense of describing the intended pronunciation properly by
the rules of a phonetic notation). Browser vendors would have little motivation
for investing on things like this, and even assistive software vendors might
not be that interested, especially if they don't expect the feature to be used
much (and properly) by authors.

On the other hand, HTML has had the lang attribute for a long time, and it is
often mentioned as important in specifications (like WAI), yet ignored by
almost all software that could make actual use of it (probably partly because
it is known to be wrong information so often). A global attribute for
pronunciation information (called "phonetic" or "pronounce" or something like
that) would impose no support _requirements_ on browsers, and it could be
defined in a simple manner.

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Received on Tuesday, 28 June 2011 04:29:40 UTC