[XHTML Role] SVG WG LC comments

Hello,

The SVG WG has reviewed the XHTML Role attribute module, W3C Working Draft
7 April 2008, http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-role/.

General comments
----------------
It's nice to see an extensible solution that allows other languages to add
additional roles using the CURIE syntax. The SVG WG looks forward to  
working
with WAI PF to define roles suitable for common types of graphics such as  
maps,
charts, etc.

It's is a pity that no RelaxNG schema is provided. Please consider adding  
one.

Whereas XHTML typically has elements to markup text, the text elements in  
SVG
provide no idea about their semantical meaning. Therefore it could be quite
useful to have some role values for 'paragraph', 'section', etc. This is
especially useful for the interpretation of documents, if there is no  
visual
rendering available due to the capabilities either of the user or the
user-agent and improves accessibility of non (X)HTML markup languages. Such
attributes might help to align prose text in SVG in a better understandable
way in such an additional text view.

For poetry (see discussion for HTML5) in contrast to (X)HTML
it is typically simple to cover the functionalities of poetry structures
with or without specific requirements for graphical rendering with SVG,
but for both  (X)HTML and SVG there is no idea of the semantical
meaning of the elements used to markup poetry (for
example 'strophe', '(strophe)line').

To provide any useful functionality with role, it is important to
have a larger list of predefined values either in the role
specification itself or in the SVG recommendation it will be used for,
else it will not be very reliable that the values of role have a meaning
at all, if every group or any author has to create his own extension,
it would be a big advantage to collect at least the text related things
(see above) or even better the already known applications directly in
the primary list:
http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab/#XHTMLRoleModule

3. The XHTML Role Attribute
---------------------------
> The following list represents some of the roles defined in the default  
> vocabulary. They are intended to define regions of the document to help  
> orient the user.

Either make it a complete list, or mark the section as informative.

Regards
/Erik, on behalf of the SVG WG

-- 
Erik Dahlstrom, Core Technology Developer, Opera Software
Co-Chair, W3C SVG Working Group
Personal blog: http://my.opera.com/macdev_ed

Received on Friday, 9 May 2008 15:23:22 UTC