Re: class definitions and grouping - example 1

At 11:06 AM -0500 3/12/01, Marja-Riitta Koivunen wrote:
>These are some things I had in my mind when doing this:
>- also a nonvisual user knows that the image and the caption text are related

How?  There is no obvious relationship encoded in the markup.

>- the caption is not just another paragraph
>- user can ask to see caption and alt text together if images are 
>not displayed

In what user agents can you make this distinction?

>- user can use classes in his stylesheet to change the type/ color 
>etc. of the caption so that it is easier to find search for them 
>when visually browsing through the text or use the class to browse 
>through them by using braille or speech

Yes, but using classes in user-defined stylesheets is highly
problematic, because classes are not meant to be universal over the
range of web sites.  A user relying upon specific class names can
easily -introduce- accessibility errors.

(And of course anything that requires the user to be able to code CSS
is a bad solution.)

>- user who want's to read the text first can skip the image and it's 
>caption and then come back to it later

How?

>- if user gathers images to a list he can also gather their captions

How?  What user agents do this?

Marja, I don't understand how you think the stated benefits actually
occur from the type of markup you used.  Yes, those are the right -ideas-,
but saying that encoding the page thusly in (X)HTML produces those
benefits is incorrect, since I don't believe that any of them actually
-work- as you'd like them to work.  You could say the same thing about
encoding it in XML as well, and it probably makes more sense to do
so since the way you want to use classes is not the way classes work,
either in practice or in theory.  They are the wrong mechanism for
doing what you want to do here.

((X)HTML lacks such a mechanism, which is the root of the problem.)

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

Received on Monday, 12 March 2001 11:40:01 UTC