Re: Exploring new vocabularies for HTML

> That's a bad analogy. Annotation is like ....

So html5 should drop the alt attribute and instead mandate that all
html5 processors are able to infer necessary information by analysing
supplied image data? This appears no different to me than saying that
you should only supply the presentation form of a math expression and
that other systems should have to infer what they need from that
presentation.


It's just a nature of mathematics, and the typesetting conventions
surrounding it, whether you are a human or a machine, except for the
very simplest cases where there are some globally accepted notations,
you have to be told both what an expression means, and the notation used
to render it. You can not infer either one from the other.

Just as with images, a picture might tell a thousand words, but if you
only have a (digital represntation of a) picture, it's pretty hard to
infer any words at all from it, which is why, despite the dangers of the
annotation being wrong, there has always been strong advice that all
images _should_ be anotated. Bu as already observed with pictures,
anotating in an attribute is fairly weak as you can't use any structured
text, so you are naturally led to anotation forms that allow structured
content, which is <sematics> in the case of mathml.

David

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Received on Sunday, 30 March 2008 10:37:18 UTC