- From: Robert J Burns <rob@robburns.com>
- Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2009 21:57:07 -0600
- To: HTML WG <public-html@w3.org>
Regarding this issue, I agree with the thrust of the sentiment expressed by Matthew May here. I'm glad to see it raised. I'd just like to add that even if we hold out hope for some great advances in image analysis and heuristics, the appropriate thing for HTML5 to do would be to encourage those features in HTML authoring tools as aids to authors of HTML. Perhaps after seeing great advances there, HTML6 might call for such tools to be deployed on the consumer side of HTML content. Too often I think we (and HTML5 does this quite often) want computers to be better at what humans can do and we neglect to deploy computers for what they're already quite good at. We leave the low hanging fruit just hanging there. So rather than providing hooks for authors to include metadata and providing algorithms that present glossaries and indexes and reference lists for data already in the document (all things that software can do quite well), we look for software to describe an image, surmise an author's intentions (like that the author must not have really meant to place a caption element inside a table cell), or summarize a table (all things software does quite poorly). So I think HTML5 should focus on the low hanging fruit and if we say anything about heuristics leave that as a recommendation for authoring tools where authors can confirm the results of the heuristics rather than relying on consumer UAs where it is then too late to confirm or correct the heuristic results. Take care, Rob
Received on Friday, 6 February 2009 03:57:47 UTC