Re: Semantic pragmatic

At 8:35 PM +0200 2001/6/26, Chris Lilley wrote:
>  > seeman wrote:
>>  E.g. <nonliteral translation="going from bad to worse"> out of the
>  > frying pan into the fire</nonliteral>
>In general, placing rendered textual content into attributes is seen as
>bad design. It is preferable to make in element content, so that it can
>contain other markup (links, ruby, etc).

Text in element content (vs. attributes) is also very useful for
translation.  If I know that all of my element content is meant as
human-readable text (and it's marked up with a proper xml:lang
designation), then I can do automatic translation on it.  If I have
to worry about whether an attribute should be translated or not, or
what language each attribute is in (note: there is no way in XML to
indicate this), then translation is much harder.

It's easier to translate this:

   <img src="blah.gif" xml:lang="en">
      <alt>Welcome to Blah.com</alt>
      <title>Blah Logo</title>
   </img>

Than this:

   <img src="blah.gif" alt="Welcome to Blah.com" title="Blah Logo" />

(Why?  Because in the first example I don't have to _know_ that certain
attributes are human-readable; in the second, I have to have specific
knowledge that alt and title are meant for people, and they're in
English.)

--Kynn



-- 
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@reef.com>
Technical Developer Liaison
Reef North America
Accessibility - W3C - Integrator Network
Tel +1 949-567-7006
________________________________________
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Received on Tuesday, 26 June 2001 15:37:08 UTC