RE: Structure Again! (not again ;)

I may be missing a point or to, and I may be completely off the mark.

It seams to me that the list is losing its focus. It seams to be becoming a
discussion group about disability and web related attitudes. Now clearly all
concert guidelines are based with a philosophy, but we can not recommend
attitudes, and it is easy to get  distracted.

We were working towards trying to focus suggestions and comments by
qualifying each one with a proposal. In other words instead of saying just
"I do not like this" we add an alternative reversion or wording of a
checkpoint, to qualify validate r feeling.

I know propose that we reinstate that format.

Yours,
L
-----Original Message-----
From: w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org]On
Behalf Of Kynn Bartlett
Sent: Tuesday, November 28, 2000 12:20 AM
To: William Loughborough; Anne Pemberton; w3c-wai-gl@w3.org
Subject: Re: Structure Again!


At 12:35 PM -0800 11/27/00, William Loughborough wrote:
>At 10:55 AM 11/27/00 -0800, Kynn Bartlett wrote:
>>The only reason that any HTML tags mean anything is because someone
>>agreed on them.
>
>The difference is that <bold> wasn't "agreed on" but foisted on the
>language by the browser implementation.

Uh, no, wrong -- but thanks for playing anyway.

>It is often pointed out that <i> for "italics" can *mean* a lot of
>things but <em> *means* one thing that can be implemented in many
>ways, including italicizing.

So what do you do when HTML, a hopelessly insufficient language for
presenting complex data, comes upon something which is normally rendered
in italics but for which there is no viable semantic representation?

Such as:

      Humans are known scientifically as <i>homo sapiens</i>.

There's no semantic tag in HTML/XHTML that allows you to specify the
above as a scientific species name.  Why is <i> insufficient for this
purpose?

>If you just want to argue, OK, but if you seriously think that
><important> means to show it a certain way on a screen or page or
>voice rather than that the author considers it important, then we
>can never agree. The difference is that <i> means nothing (except to
>whoever designed some implementation) and <important> has an agreed
>upon semantic meaning in the English (American?) language. It can be
>translated reliably, the "meaning" of <i> cannot because it "means"
>more things. The "agreed on" part is what's central to this and the
>elements that are "structural" have been agreed on, those that are
>presentational, not.

There is also no agreed upon meaning for:

      This is a sentence.

A piece of text which is not marked up is equivalent to a piece of
text which is marked up with "make this italic".  If the meaning
can still be discerned, then the italics do no harm.

By the way, <important> means absolutely nothing, because it's just a
string of characters.  <i> means something because it is defined by
a spec and because the browsers understand what it means.

>KB:: "For example, the average web page is not rightly a
>heading-based structure"
>WL: There is no "average web page".

Only if you want to live in a world of idealism.  In practice, the
majority of web pages all are rather similar and can be categorized
into a number of broad groups that describe what they do.

>Structure takes many forms and <h1>, etc. is a fundamental one in
>the "tree" sense, but of course not the only one.

It is, however, the only one available in HTML, which is why there has
been little interest in abiding strictly by HTML's model of document
structure.

>The Web is not TV. It will not have a set of "superior beings"
>furnishing "content" to passive "users" - we already have had a
>surfeit of that in media/schools/nations etc.

Where did that come from?

>If someone wants to have a Web that's not "Semantic" they can
>continue doing what was done before - it's called "TV".

You are really going out on a tangent here and you are ascribing near-
magical properties to this "Semantic Web" vision.  Oh, heavens, we all
must buy into the Semantic Web theory or else it will devolve into
that horror of horrors, television??  This argument makes little to
no sense whatsoever, William.

(Yes, yes, someone will quote Semantic Web Dogma at me, usually starting
with "Tim Berners-Lee said...", and prove that the only way that we
can avoid passive users is via the magic Semantic Web.  Yes, whatever.)

>KB:: "It's not that web designers are consciously deciding to be
>irresponsible -- it's because a hierarchical outline structure to a
>document does not fit their needs. XHTML structural tags are not
>used because they have proven, repeatedly, to be insufficient for
>the needs of the people using them."
>
>WL: They're not consciously deciding to be irresponsible, they're
>just unaware of these matters. They haven't worried their pretty
>little heads about anything beneath appearances.

Not that we mean to be condescending to them or anything.

Good thing we're not a set of "superior beings" furnishing "content"
guidelines to passive "users" or anything.  We've already had a surfeit
of that.  Instead let's just look down our noses, decide that the
people we're trying to preach to are misguided idiots without a thought
in their pretty little heads who only care about surface glitter.

>This is true of all of us to a large extent, but the means of
>learning more is upon us. Their "needs" are vague at best

No, the needs of web designers are not "vague at best", and this
continued insistence that actual web designers' needs aren't worth
shit is exactly why this group's "guidelines" (read: dogmatic
fascist rules imposed by an elite few who only consider their own
needs to be important and everyone else's to be insignificant in
the fulfillment of their own personal vision of the web) are
likely doomed to worthlessness.  At least, if we continue holding
viewpoints such as those which William espouses.

>and to imply that structural tags (of whatever stripe) are "insufficient"

Current structural types _are_ insufficient.  You can't write an
acceptable (by real world standards, not those which you write yourself
from an ivory tower) web site in XHTML 1.0 Strict, even if it will
be structurally sound.

And presentational control is very much necessary, and if you state
otherwise then you are either deluding yourself or you are stubbornly
refusing to listen to any viewpoint besides your own.

>is like saying there's just not enough colors available to express
>one's "mood". If the tags are insufficient, make new ones. The point
>is that structure is essential to sanity.

That's a nice catch phrase, especially as it's so vague as to mean
nothing.  Feel free to expand on it if you like.

--Kynn
--
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com>
http://www.kynn.com/

Received on Tuesday, 28 November 2000 08:07:12 UTC