Restatement of Principle 2

To address an important issue raised by Gregg at last week's meeting, I
would like to propose the following amendment to Principle 2:

"Separate content and structure from presentation, and ensure that
significant structural or semantic distinctions are captured explicitly in
markup, or in a data model."

This change should be self-explanatory. The guidelines grouped under
Principle 3 set forth the requirements in detail and attempt to furnish
criteria with which to identify "significant" distinctions that need to be
preserved.

A note could be added to guideline 5 of Principle 3, stating that it may
be advantageous to preserve additional semantic distinctions for the
benefit of search engines and other data processing applications. In
effect, this would be an allusion to the concept of a "semantic web", and
would also show that a semantically rich markup scheme or data
representation has benefits that extend far beyond "accessibility".

Received on Saturday, 15 July 2000 20:41:52 UTC