Standard Icon Set

Proposal:

There should be a modality-independent, platform-independent,
implementation-independent way to refer to standard iconic
information.  This should be a work undertaken by the W3C and
others interested parties.

Ideas:

* Creation of a sufficiently large set of standard icon
  types and at least 3 sets (of varying size) of those icons.
  Each icon is identified by a "code name" as well as a translation
  in the major languages.  E.g.:

  Code       Translation (English) 
  file       File                 
  search     Search
  www        The World Wide Web
 
* The creation of an "icon:" pseudo-URI scheme similar to the
  "about:" URIs found in many browsers.  This would enable the
  following:

  <a href="http://kynn.com/search/">
    <img src="icon:search" alt="Search this site" />
  </a>

* Alternately (or in addition), extend XHTML entity sets to include
  the icon sets (possibly via assigning them to unicode):

  <a href="http://kynn.com/search/">
    <span alt="&icon-search;">Search</span>
    this site
  </a> or
  <a href="http://google.com/">
    <span alt="&icon-search;">Search</span>
    the
    <span alt="&icon-www;">Web</span>
  </a>

* Possibly the following can work as well:

  <a href="http://kynn.com/search/">
    &icon-search; this site
  </a> or
  <a href="http://google.com/">&icon-search; the &icon-www;</a>
  
* Or when encountering the following:

  <a href="http://google.com/">Search the Web</a>

  ...n intelligent user agent or server processor could convert that
  to iconic markup automatically.

* Icon sets function as fonts in textual visual browsers, allowing the
  user to select which icon set is desired -- e.g., one based on
  size or contrast or colors or simplicity, or maybe just a general
  style.  Users can install additional icon sets made by various
  groups of people.

If I have time I will propose something like this to the W3C,
perhaps as part of the Device Independent activity which is being
discussed.  Is anyone else interested in working on this?  Has anyone
else done such a project already or any of the work toward it?

--&icon-Kynn;

Received on Monday, 9 October 2000 05:32:34 UTC