- From: Philip Taylor (Webmaster) <P.Taylor@Rhul.Ac.Uk>
- Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2007 18:28:17 +0100
- To: "Gregory J. Rosmaita" <oedipus@hicom.net>
- CC: HTML Working Group <public-html@w3.org>, wai-xtech@w3.org
Gregory J. Rosmaita wrote: > i will speak to what i personally know, and hope that others using other > set ups will do the same [...] > i hope this helps answer your question, phil -- if not, ask again! Many thanks, Gregory. A very detailed answer indeed, and most informative, but perhaps because of the detail I'm still uncertain as to one point. Suppose that, within a single document, I have instances of book titles, ship's names, scientific names, and foreign words and phrases, all of which are conventionally indicated in printed English by the use of italics. None of these are sufficiently widespread for them to justify a unique element within a specialised markup language such as HTML, and because of the non-extensible nature of HTML 5 [1], I can't create nonce-elements [2] such as <book-title>, <ships-name>, <Linnaean-binomial> and so on. The obvious alternative appears to be to mark up each of these using the closest available element (<span>, <em> or <i> : each has its pros and cons), and then to indicate the actual variant through the |class| attribute, as in <span class="Book-title">The Quare Fellow</span> <em class="Linnaean-binomial">Lagopus hyperboreus</em> <i class="Loan-word">Zeitgeist</i> I have always assumed (somewhat naively !) that such markup might be of help to those relying on screen readers, but if I understand your answer correctly, this is not the case (at least for JAWS). If that is so, how might both the HTML language and AT evolve in such a way that nice distinctions such as these can be made more accessible to users of AT ? Until such evolution occurs, it would seem that the best hope lies with the use pseudo-elements such as :before and :after [3] from CSS, but how well is CSS 2 supported by JAWS and similar AT systems ? Philip TAYLOR -------- [1] Dialects of HTML up to and including HTML 4.01 were all SGML-based, and therefore one could define a custom DTD should one wish to use elements other than those pre-defined. Even if such elements were not afforded any special treatment by normal browsers, the ability to use nonce-elements was beneficial from the perspective of semantic markup. HTML 5, as currently proposed, appears to lack this mechanism for user-defined extensions, something which I for one feel is not only very serious omission but also a a major step backwards. [2] http://www.answers.com/topic/nonce-word [3] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/selector.html#before-and-after
Received on Thursday, 30 August 2007 17:28:39 UTC