- From: Richard Ishida <ishida@w3.org>
- Date: Mon, 16 Jan 2006 14:00:50 -0000
- To: "GEO" <public-i18n-geo@w3.org>
I had an action from last week's telecon to locate this email about the separation of presentation and content. RI ============ Richard Ishida Internationalization Lead W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) http://www.w3.org/People/Ishida/ http://www.w3.org/International/ http://people.w3.org/rishida/blog/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/ishida/ -----Original Message----- From: public-evangelist-request@w3.org [mailto:public-evangelist-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Richard Ishida Sent: 28 October 2004 14:38 To: 'Stephanie Troeth'; public-evangelist@w3.org Subject: RE: web standards project article Separation of structure and presentation is also important for internationalization, since presentational aspects don't always carry over from one script to another - eg. italicisation and bolding are problematic for Japanese and Chinese in small font sizes, because their characters are so complicated; monospaced fonts don't work well with scripts like Arabic; Asian text may express emphasis by using a dot above each character, and German via inter-character spacing - all things we don't thing about when writing English. If the information is expressed in semantic terms, and a style sheet is used, it is *much* easier (and therefore much less costly) to consistently apply the appropriately different styling during translation (plus, there is more choice). By the way, widening this out to include XML, most of us realise that using <b> and <i> for emphasis in XML is a bad thing, but I've seen developers who without a thought went on to use <emph type="bold"> or <emph type="italic"> instead of <emph type="normal"> and <emph type="strong">, or some such. Of course, similar things can be done with classes in HTML. Note also that use of a semantic-oriented approach will have the additional benefit of providing more discipline and reason in the way authors use and apply emphasis and style formatting related to document conventions, because they need to ask themselves *why* they are wanting to distinguish a particular part of the text. It also promotes consistency. If a stylesheet is used it will systematically apply the same presentation to the same types of information. (For more on this wrt XML, see http://people.w3.org/rishida/localizable-dtds/#emphasis.) RI ============ Richard Ishida W3C contact info: http://www.w3.org/People/Ishida/ W3C Internationalization: http://www.w3.org/International/ Publication blog: http://people.w3.org/rishida/blog/
Received on Monday, 16 January 2006 14:01:00 UTC