RE: The missing Sentence tag

HTML Working Group,

Reasons for a sentence element, beyond semantic structure and intersentence spacing and layout, including as per scientific and scholarly document styles, some of which describe different intersentence spacing, include speech synthesis, with topics pertinent to the CSS3 Speech module (http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-speech/) where SSML (http://www.w3.org/TR/speech-synthesis11/) has both paragraph and sentence elements while describing the use of paragraph and sentence elements as optional and that, in the absence of paragraph of sentence markup, a synthesis processor should attempt to utilize language-specific knowledge of the format of plain text.

With regard to a JavaScript Speech API, speech synthesis inputs are possible beyond text strings, to XML strings and to document object model nodes which could contain XML-based or CSS-based content for speech synthesizers. There are, additionally, ideas for versioning SSML including to enhance the prosodic synthesis of speech from natural language generation components, with such extended expressiveness possibly pertaining to a CSS Speech module, with some discussion in the Voice Browser Working Group, Natural Language Generation, SSML, and Prosody (http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-voice/2012OctDec/0004.html).

Sentence elements could be provided to web document authors while described as optional, sentence elements can enhance document semantics, stylizable document rendering, and the speech synthesis of documents.



Kind regards,

Adam Sobieski