(unknown charset) Re: General Exception for Essential Purpose

On Sat, 28 Oct 2000, Al Gilman wrote:

> At 12:40 PM 2000-10-29 +1100, Jason White wrote:
> >>
> 
> This is related to the fact that Web media are intrinsically semi-formal or
> partially-understood formats.  Or the fact that our formal models of natural
> language are approximate, not complete and fluent.
> 
> In natural language, the diction used in bullet lists is different from the
> diction used in narrative or oral presentation of the same set of ideas.  The
> transformations are complex.  The state of the art in natural language
> processing is not presently up to performing the transformation between these
> variants and appearing fluent in the output.  This is similar to the state of
> automatic translation among natural languages.  Different display and
> interaction spaces have their own idioms and optimizations that the artful
> author and designer follow, but nobody has reduced to complete and fluent rule
> sets.  The art of writing captures and conveys more than does the science of
> grammar.
> 
There are indeed differences in natural language usage that correspond
better to particular contexts (spoken delivery vs. a written presentation)
as the bulleted list example demonstrates; and automatic transformation of
writing style from one to the other lies beyond the capability of present
(and perhaps also future) technology. However, it is questionable whether
these differences are sufficiently significant to make the extra effort of
writing two or more versions of natural language content worthwhile, and
it is also unclear that the same argument extends to aspects of content
that are normally controlled by style properties and for which markup
provides abstractions.
 
> 
> To gracefully span a range of media as distant as HTML on the computer screen
> compared with VoxML on the phone, it is not enough to change what we have
> isolated in style languages as presentation properties.  "The content" has to
> change, too.  This is a message that I think I heard Daniel take away from the
> Bristol workshop.  I hope I am not misquoting him.
I do not believe you are misquoting him. I have often heard the conclusion
stated, but usually without any supporting arguments, apart from pragmatic
considerations such as lack of implementation of standards across a
variety of devices and software implementations. If there is a clearly
written and cogent defence of such a position I would very much like to
read it.
 > 
> People with disabilities do put up with some pretty ugly transformations when
> the alternative is that it doesn't work at all.  Commercial competition sets a
> higher standard for graceful results.  So we should be glad that commercial
> interest is now being shown in the problem of how to serve the same
> information
> in diverse interaction spaces.  The results of doing this intentionally should
> turn out better than what we can arrange as workarounds.
> 
If it involves rewriting the content for each interaction space then,
if the benefits of it are seen to be large and commercially attractive
then it will be carried out with respect to certain web sites; but I
suspect that most content will not be rewritten for the sake of different
devices and usage scenarios, apart from natural language translation,
which still is not as common as it should be. Probably there will remain a
high proportion of content which, if it is transformed at all, will be
transformed via automatic processes (mechanical application of style rules
to some pre-existing representation), with some alternative presentations
(text equivalents etc.) substituted as needed.
> I think that I would side with Jason a bit in saying that Kynn's claim that
> the
> single source strategy is inferior "in theory and in practice" is a little too
> strong.  I am not sure we have adequate theory to demonstrate the theoretical
> inferiority of that approach.  However, I am inclined to expect. with Kynn,
> that the alternative where the people make more of the transformation
> decisions
> manually up front will work out better in practice.  Unless, of course, they
> think that they have thought of everything and nothing therefore has to be
> left
> flexible...
Indeed, that is the problem, which providing, for example, two versions,
one for high-resolution graphic displays and another for mobile
telephones, if both versions are presentational in character, won't
resolve. An indirect consequence may be the creation of a well structured
version of the content from which both presentations are generated, but
unless this is available for further processing under the user's control
it won't help much.

Note that I am not trying to disagree with Al's position here, only to
probe some of the rleevant arguments.

Received on Sunday, 29 October 2000 01:06:40 UTC