- From: Leif Halvard Silli <lhs@malform.no>
- Date: Sat, 09 Aug 2008 01:33:13 +0200
- To: Philip Taylor <pjt47@cam.ac.uk>
- CC: Dave Singer <singer@apple.com>, "public-html@w3.org" <public-html@w3.org>
Philip Taylor 2008-08-08 20.43: > Dave Singer wrote: > It's not fundamentally > different to assuming users will recognise and understand what "Σax²" > means, except that it's a different choice of syntax. TeX/LaTeX is more than a different syntax. It also uses other symbols than the normal math symbols. > (Some users won't understand one or the other or both of those syntaxes, > just like some won't understand the surrounding English prose or the > concepts being explained, and that's okay since I would only be writing > equations for a specialised audience.) But if you are user friendly, then you allow me to know that you wrote the equation as TeX code. Then I have the chance to look up TeX to understand what you meant. >> Yes, if you want to put Latex in there (or any other text), you'll >> need to put something before an initial {; perhaps something that >> helps you diagnose that it is, in fact, latex source, and not really >> alt text at all. hear hear. >> Perhaps, even >> alt="{latex} {x \over y} = {1 \over {y \over x}}" >> ? > > According to the current HTML 5 spec (as I understand it), that means > the image is a key part of the content, and there is no textual > equivalent of the image available, and the kind of image is "latex} {x > \over y} = {1 \over {y \over x}". I agree with Phillip's reading of the current spec. > I believe the LaTeX code *is* a textual equivalent (because it's text > (being a human-readable string of mostly-ASCII characters) and it has > equivalent meaning to the rendered image without any complex encoding), > so that meaning is inappropriate; and the extracted string between the > outermost "{" and "}" is clearly not what was intended, and it's not the > kind of image anyway. (The kind would be something like "equation", but > that's thoroughly unhelpful to users who can't see the image.) It is *not* a textual *equivalent*. It is a textual *fallback*. It is a "if you can't understand the image, perhaps you would like to read the source code I used to generate it from?" Of course source code can sometimes be used as fallback. > Something like alt="LaTeX: {x \over ... }" would avoid those problems, > but still that's ugly (particularly if you have many equations in a > single sentence) and redundant (since it's pretty clear when text is > LaTeX, to readers who understand LaTeX) and it's not entirely obvious > how to implement this correctly (as you demonstrated by using "{latex} > {...}" which'll get badly misinterpreted :-) ). One simple rule could be to say that if the <img> has lang="zxx", then the @alt="{keyword}" rule won't apply. -- leif halvard silli
Received on Friday, 8 August 2008 23:34:01 UTC