Re: Proposal for Guideline 1.1 [definition of text]

Dear Gregg, Jason,

Sorry for jumping late (even later than Christophe) into this 
discussion, but I believe Christophe is making two very valid points in 
regard to the proposed wording for the guideline:

- Any reference to XML 1.1 should be removed, as many experts in the 
field are explicitly recommending *not* to use it because of its 
breaking of backwards compatibility (white space handling, name 
characters, etc.), unless you want to write element names in Ethiopic 
(Amharic, Geez, etc.), Burmese, Cambodian, Mongolian, Dvihehi or Yi 
syllabary [1]

- In regard to the second item of the discussion, I believe that the 
point is not whether you use Unicode or not, but whether you use a 
character set whose specification is open so AT manufacturers can 
implement it. Following the same line of arguments into other sections 
of WCAG, we could say that some well-known proprietary formats can never 
be made accessible, since they are not "standard."

Just 2 cents,
regards,
carlos




[1] Elliotte Rusty Harold: 
<http://cafeconleche.org/slides/xmlone/london2002/advancedxml/54.html>

Jason White wrote:
> ...
> 
> This kind of situation can be very real if the document is stored in an
> encoding specific to the fonts used in rendering it. Without a mapping to
> Unicode (or another standard character set/encoding), the user agent can't
> identify the characters in the document, or can do so at best only
> partially. Often the font is provided along with the document, as in PDF,
> which supports an Unicode map for exactly the purpose described here,
> i.e., identifying the characters used in font-specific encodings.
> 
> 

-- 
Dr Carlos A Velasco - http://access.fit.fraunhofer.de/
Fraunhofer-Institut für Angewandte Informationstechnik FIT
   [Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology (FIT)]
   Barrierefreie Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologie für Alle
   Schloss Birlinghoven, D53757 Sankt Augustin (Germany)
   Tel: +49-2241-142609 Fax: +49-2241-1442609

Received on Thursday, 26 May 2005 18:41:33 UTC