Re: OWL-S version 1.1 now available

Bijan Parsia wrote:

> On Nov 20, 2004, at 9:50 AM, David Martin wrote:
> [snip]
> 
>>> * also in section 5.5, there are some decidedly unnecessary inline 
>>> images used to encode formulae.  Don't do this!  It violates all 
>>> sorts of usability and accessibility guidelines, and it doesn't 
>>> render properly in firefox. Maybe it does in IE, but in FF the 
>>> vertical spacing is all out of whack.
> 
> 
> Safari too. Just checked.
> 
>> These are only there because, well, time is finite.  This document was 
>> derived from an HTML document generated by a program called 
>> latex2html, which made heavy use of inline images.  I completely agree 
>> that these are unnecessary, but in the rush of millions of details it 
>> seemed pretty low priority to eliminate them.  I didn't realize that 
>> they wouldn't render properly in firefox.  Now that that is known, it 
>> becomes a much higher priority.
> 
> 
> Yep. I'm a little surprised latex2html was this dumb about these. 
> Perhaps it just gifs everything in mathmode?
> 
> One should be able to coax better. Where are the latex sources, perhaps 
> I can figure out how to automate it.

Thanks for offering, but it's not worthwhile at this point.  We don't 
plan to use latex2html (or latex sources) anymore.  From here on out, we 
will directly modify the XHTML sources.

- David

> 
>> (However, at the same time, I'm a little surprised that the use of 
>> inline images violates useability and accessibility guidelines.  That 
>> seems unfortunate, because it's not hard to imagine situations where 
>> you'd want to use inline images that were not unnecessary.)
> 
> 
> It's not universally a violation. However, in general, using images for 
> text or otherwise encodable content is a bad idea since it makes the 
> content *presentationally fixed* and *opaque*.  For example, the 
> formulas won't reseize when you resize the surrounding text. You can't 
> select them or subparts. Text to speech (for visually impaired users) 
> just die on them. Etc. etc.
> 
> So the general preference is to use unicode char & markup languages like 
> MathML whereever possible.
> 
>>> * also in section 5.5, the example refers to the literal type 
>>> "&xsd;Integer", which isn't a URI in the XSD namespace.  Should be 
>>> "&xsd;integer"
>>> * In section 6, you need to address how to map between URI's which 
>>> OWL uses and WSDL doesn't, and XML q-name pairs which WSDL uses and 
>>> OWL doesn't. I don't know if the TAG have resolved this yet, but I 
>>> don't think there's a definitive mapping between them. If not, you 
>>> should say how you expect this to happen.
>>
>>
>> Very good point.  I don't know the answer to this either, but we'll 
>> look in to it.
> 
> [snip]
> 
> WSDL 2.0 supplies a mapping from the qnames to canonical URIs for 
> components (using a set of xpointer schemes). We could do one for WSDL 
> 1.1 as well, I suppose.
> 
> Cheers,
> Bijan.
>

Received on Sunday, 21 November 2004 05:50:30 UTC