Re: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

At 09:19 PM 3/3/99 +0000, jonathan chetwynd wrote:
>z.z    this is not altogether flippant, why is the provider of a multimedia
>sensory experience named HTML?
>
>A touch of the academicians, perhaps.

Yes, there is some history embedded in the name.  One of the key advantages
of the Web when it was new was the hyper-linking feature that would take
you straight to a new starting place anywhere in the world.  This
hyper-linking was first implemented with text, so it is commonly known as
HyperText.

It is called a markup language because it uses SGML-style tags to provide
content and metadata interwoven in a single text stream.

>Providing tags for text might be an appropriate nod to other input.

Letting one class of content be the default can increase efficiency.

W3C is now developing Scalable Vector Graphics where the default will be
vector drawing instructions, not text, and text will be the inserts.  In
fact, the format W3C has developed for multimedia, SMIL, basically has
plugin media players as the default kind of content.  Web documents can
have these formats as their mother document.  So it has indeed grown beyond
Hyper- "Text."

Al

Received on Thursday, 4 March 1999 08:34:30 UTC