[Issue 673] Proposed definitions for text, Unicode, non-text content (without typos)

Proposed definitions to address issue 673 [1]. Notes and references at
[2].  These definitions are not perfect, but lay the basis for 
tomorrow's teleconference discussion about Unicode and text.

text
A sequence of characters included in the Unicode character set. Refer to
Characters [3] in Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Third Edition) for
more specific information about the accepted character range.

Unicode
In this document, we use "Unicode" to refer to the Unicode character set
and not the character encoding.
(@@ the Unicode character set may be encoded in ASCII, UTF-8, UTF-16, 
etc. characters in the Unicode set can be created with numeric character 
references - so there is a clear separation between the character 
encoding and those characters defined in the unicode character set that 
we consider "text"- @@provide reference to I18N list? @@link to Unicode 
spec?)

non-text content
Non-text content is content that can not be represented by a Unicode
character or sequence of unicode characters. Non-text content includes
but is not limited to
* images and graphics,
* sound clips, movies, and animations,
* ASCII art (which may use several Unicode characters to create an image)
Providing text alternatives for non-text content is addressed in
Guideline 1.1, providing captions and audio descriptions of multimedia
is addressed in guideline 1.2, and interacting with non-text content via
scripts, applets, and programmatic objects is addressed in guideline 4.2 .

[1] <http://trace.wisc.edu/bugzilla_wcag/show_bug.cgi?id=673>
[2] <http://www.w3.org/2004/09/wcag-unicode.html>
[3] <http://w3.org/TR/2004/REC-xml-20040204/#charsets>
-- 
wendy a chisholm
world wide web consortium
web accessibility initiative
http://www.w3.org/WAI/
/--

Received on Wednesday, 8 September 2004 23:58:13 UTC