- From: john_slatin <john_slatin@forum.utexas.edu>
- Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2002 08:50:21 -0500
- To: "'jasonw@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au'" <jasonw@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au>, Web Content Guidelines <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
As usual, Jason has articulated something I wasn't quite able to say yesterday: the main reason I was so concerned that 3.1 should make room for the structural elements of media other than text media other than text was precisely that the proposal for 4.1 focuses so closely on written language. During yesterday's telecon the question arose of how to mark up structural aspects of (for example) older documents that don't conform to contemporary ideas about document design. This issue also came up during the face to face meeting in Linz last month. The best resource I know of for addressing this concern is the Text Encoding Initiative's (TEI) DTD. The TEI, headed up by C.M. Sperberg-McQueen (who's familiar to many on this list, I think) and Lou Burnard of Oxford University, is an interdisciplinary consortium of scholars in the humanities. Their goal was to produce a set of tags for maring up a wide variety of literary and linguistic documents from many different historical periods and countries, written in many different languages. One important concern was to preserve the kind of metadata that literary historians, bibliographers, and others often demand regarding the state of the material artifact (i.e., the physical, paper (or parchment, or vellum, or papyrus)) text that serves as the basis for an electronic edition. The TEI DTD may offer some useful tools for Web authors who need to identify and expose structural devices that fall outside the HTML elements. The TEI site is at http://www.tei-c.org/. John John Slatin, Ph.D. Director, Institute for Technology & Learning University of Texas at Austin FAC 248C, Mail code G9600 Austin, TX 78712 ph 512-495-4288, f 512-495-4524 email jslatin@mail.utexas.edu web http://www.ital.utexas.edu -----Original Message----- From: Jason White [mailto:jasonw@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au] Sent: Thursday, August 22, 2002 11:42 pm To: Web Content Guidelines Subject: Re: 22 Aug 2002 - WCAG WG Teleconference Minutes With apologies for my inability to attend today's meeting, here are my comments on the minutes: 1. If checkpoint 4.1 is rewritten as Avi, Lisa et al., have suggested, viz., "Use plain language", then it will not be possible to move what is currently in checkpoint 3.1 under checkpoint 4.1. 2. At today's meeting, the overlaps between 1.3 and 3.1 success criteria were addressed and I think excellent progress has been made. 3. The point referring to "reading order" was not intended simply to address tables, much less tables used for layout; it is a much more general claim that (within a single document/user interface) it must be possible to create a reasonable, linear reading order. Everything from columnized text (with no markup to disambiguate it) to tables (again without proper markup) to the use of graphical layout operators, for example in SVG, to control the presentation and arrangement of text (again without adequate markup) should fail to satisfy this point. The underlying claim is that there ought to exist sufficient semantics (in markup/data model as per checkpoint 1.3) to enable a reading order to be constructed. Thus the requirement belongs as a success criterion under 1.3. In general I think the meeting was excellent, judging by the minutes.
Received on Friday, 23 August 2002 09:50:29 UTC