- From: Sean B. Palmer <sean@mysterylights.com>
- Date: Thu, 10 May 2001 02:50:01 +0100
- To: "William Loughborough" <love26@gorge.net>, "Anne Pemberton" <apembert@erols.com>
- Cc: <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
> > [...] There is also little (almost no!) illustration used > > at f2f meetings - almost certainly none that cannot be > > reduced to spoken language, hence text. > > This is a detriment to communicating our output. We are limiting > our audience to those who are facile with text ... but our true > audience goes beyond such definitions. Yes! This reminds me very much of the sign-object-concept relationship of John Sowa that Seth keeps going on about. Words are a representation of concepts... but so are pictures. Why should we limit ourselves to one form of expression when another can serve just as well (and indeed better) in certain contexts? The problem is as WL pointed out - text is repurposable. Any generic symbols can most likely also be made to be repurposable, and then you get into that awful murky area about what constitutes a good "sign"... does a lightbulb in a sign mean a lightbuld or an idea? With words it's usually clearer because of the context, but pictures are more difficult (although not impossible) to assign contexts to. SVG is a bright light on the horizon, because it allows certain parts of images to be repurposed... but it lacks implementation. As William says, this might well change the way we think, but it is unlikely to change what we do. That's a shame, but at least it is an almost understandable shame. Still, I like the notion of reversing "provide text for multimedia" to "provide multimedia for text". One interesting point to raise is that by adding text to images you aren't really doing much except enabling repurposing... whereas by adding multimedia to text, often you can add something that simply cannot be expressed in text. Which is more moving - an article about war in black and white, or an article about war with pictures of the tragides that are occuring? William is always asking us (with good reason!) to think of the starving babies, but maybe he would have more impact if he attached a picture of a starving baby to every email that he sent? I suppose illustrations could make a good Barnraising. -- Kindest Regards, Sean B. Palmer @prefix : <http://webns.net/roughterms/> . :Sean :hasHomepage <http://purl.org/net/sbp/> .
Received on Wednesday, 9 May 2001 21:49:54 UTC