- From: Charles F. Munat <coder@acnet.net>
- Date: Fri, 15 Jan 1999 11:56:41 -0600
- To: <waz@easynet.co.uk>, <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Wayne wrote: "A special kind of PRE tag would be good, with an ALT of some sort, and then we could use ASCII art, and would have some way of making it accessible and dealing with the large online legacy of currently inaccessible-due-to-ascii-artwork documents." You can already accomplish this for some browsers by using the TITLE attribute with the PRE tag. I tested this in pwWebspeak 2.5 and it worked well, although it tried to read some of the "punctuation." At least you could currently give a warning such as TITLE="ASCII art: Picture of a baby's arm holding an apple." I suppose you could also use a SPAN tag. And it might be wise to put something at the end of the artwork to indicate that it was complete, like an empty span tag with TITLE="End of ASCII art." Of course, neither of these will work with plain-text email, so my simple solution for that is: WRITE ENGLISH. I, for one, don't have much patience with people who rely on "emoticons" to express their feelings. Somehow, we managed to make it through a thousand years of English literature without them. I consider the emoticon simple laziness. Worse, they are often used, in my opinion, in a deceptive manner. "You are all a bunch of idiots. :)" There. Did the smiley face make it all ok? Frankly, I wish there were a way to remove emoticons completely. I refuse to use them and I am disgusted when I receive them in email from people I would otherwise consider to be sane and intelligent. I think that writing (smile) would be a much more accessible alternative, although I still have a problem with the whole IRC shorthand making its way into everyday language. If you are in a happy mood, can't you just write "I'm in a happy mood"? It doesn't take a degree in English to do that. Consider what might have happened if we'd devised emoticons a couple of hundred years ago: Moby Dick: Call me Ishmael. :( Gravity's Rainbow: A screaming comes across the sky. :O Or consider this: When in the course of human events... :( Take that, King George. The whole thing makes me ill. But, if one must use them, you could add a span tag with the title set to "Stupid smiley face" or something like that. In plain text messages you could put it in plain text [stupid smiley face] next to the emoticon. That way we avoid the big arguments sure to come over what the "official" meaning of the emoticon will be. Which brings up another point. Taken out of context, can we really define these emoticons? Sure a smile and a wink is pretty easy, but some are pretty complicated. And even the smile can be misinterpreted. Consider all the discussion about "universal symbols." Are any symbols truly universal? And who gets to decide which one is which? Do we have an international standard (ISO maybe?) or will this be a W3C recommendation or maybe just an American thing? I shudder at the implications. For my part, I simply refuse to participate, and I ask those who communicate with me regularly to avoid them in messages to me. Final note: Business is business. A study showed that waitresses who drew little smiley faces on the backs of their checks got higher tips than those who didn't. Just to be safe, I've added little smiley emoticons to the back of all my web pages. Charles Munat Puerto Vallarta
Received on Friday, 15 January 1999 13:06:37 UTC