RE: Liaison with CSS WG to provide a mechanism for expressing the style of document semantics

Jens -

The idea behind this is to allow CSS authors to assign a "legend" to a particular CSS class. The presentation allows for the "legend" definition to include text, and the styling of said text in a variety of formats (on-screen, spoken, etc.). The presentation itself of the legend is undefined by the draft; it could be a tool-tip for a browser, it could require, say, a right-click and then "More details..." from the browser, a screen reader might use a different voice for it, it. The idea is that certain classes, while having different *content*, may all represent the same *type* of thing which would all require the same *explanatory* text; not the same as @alt, but similar in purpose to a few particular use cases for @alt (if that makes sense).

My *personal opinion* (and that is all it is), is that this spec just does not serve many people in its current form, but I do not think that it does any damage either. I also believe that (unrelated, but in the same vein) we would be well served by allowing the integration of ARIA-role into CSS (since many CSS classes are defined in a way that molds a "generic" tag like span or div into a specific role, and because I've always preferred spec-enumerated items because that makes machine comprehension easier), which was sparked by reading this. 

It took me quite a while to understand this myself, and a *lot* of back-and-forth. I agree that the religious examples are counter-productive (I think I may have used one or two myself in the thread on the topic), and muddle the draft. I understand the use of them in the example (many Bible editions put the words of Jesus in red), but I think it would behoove us to have a less emotionally charged example in the draft.

More importantly, I think that the draft requires a complete overhaul. It took way too much time and effort for the people on this list to understand how this was to be used and why it is there at all; I can't imagine this portion of the draft being a readily consumed and leveraged part of the spec in its current state. This is also true of the "workers" draft, I may add.

J.Ja

> -----Original Message-----
> From: public-html-request@w3.org [mailto:public-html-request@w3.org] On
> Behalf Of Jens Meiert
> Sent: Monday, July 28, 2008 5:43 AM
> To: public-html@w3.org
> Subject: Re: Liaison with CSS WG to provide a mechanism for expressing
> the style of document semantics
> 
> 
> > [1]: <http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/SemanticPresentationLegendCSS>
> 
> Need to bring that up again: Would anyone please mind explaining this
> proposal again? I cannot detect any great advantages so far, not even
> in the respective thread.
> 
> Apart from that, do we really want to use examples involving religious
> context? To be honest, I think that is not appropriate, not at all (I
> think it's even offending), and I'd like to discourage everyone to use
> political or religious statements anywhere in documentation.
> 
> --
> Jens Meiert
> http://meiert.com/en/

Received on Monday, 28 July 2008 14:37:54 UTC