Re: need a new tag

At 11:14 +0100 13/05/2001, David Woolley wrote:
>  > people will have difficulty with English and so we need to be sure
>
>The ideal solution here is language negotiation, but I accept that
>that may be too expensive.

Aie. That would be awesome, indeed. The peoples we need to address 
could be using the languages of at least: New Zealand Maori, Samoa, 
Tonga, Niue, Vietnam, Malaysia, Serbia, Croatia, Ukraine and other 
formerly USSR countries, various African countries and a large number 
of other countries. [I'm aware that in New Zealand we have large 
numbers of people from other countries, and especially in Auckland 
large numbers of  migrants from all the Pacific Islands and refugees 
from a number of countries, but demographics isn't my strong suit.]

We'll also have a wide variety of people for whom English is their 
first language but whose literacy skills range from degree holders to 
those who might use the services of adult literacy programmes.

>  > understand" is a desire to allow people to keep reading on the one
>>  page, not to open new windows, to use plain language.
>
>Accessibility guidelines say that you do not open new windows; you
>replace the current contents.

Indeed, that's one reason I don't want to open new windows. Replacing 
the contents though can easily lead to disruption in the flow of 
reading the text. While I'm happy to take people to another page for 
longer and more complex explanations I'd rather not do it for the 
more minor explanations.

>  > If we consider the draft paragraphs below I think there are two
>>  "glossary" things going on. In the last para I link to a separate
>>  page explaining concepts such as "click and drag" etc. These
>>  explanations are several sentences long. In the first para though I
>>  deliberately use the word "format" which is then effectively
>>  explained in the following sentence.
>
>This is really a writing style thing.  If you are writing for beginners
>you should not forward reference definitions, or if you do so, you should
>explicitly mark the reference with something like "(see following)" in plain
>text.  In HTML, you can then indicate where "following" is by using a fragment
>hyperlink (#xxx relative URL).

I think this is somewhat overkill when the explanation is only a few 
words away. Where there are whole chunks of text separating them then 
it's a useful strategy.

>Don't forget to mark the actual definition with DFN.

This might have been what I was looking for when I declared a need 
for a "new tag". I had completely overlooked the dfn tag. Thanks for 
drawing it to my attention.

>  > I want to be able to use a Tooltip for the word "format". We need to
>
>Tooltip is a Microsoft Windows term.  If you are developing HTML standards,
>you must think more generally than Windows.

As a dedicated Mac user I've simply become used to using terminology 
that so many other people understand. I'm thinking in terms of 
browsers being used by home users: IE, Netscape and maybe some others 
such as Opera and iCab on Windows and Mac. I'm also aiming to make 
the pages easy to use for those who have disabilities and who may be 
using speech readers and the like. I'm not specially aiming at Linux 
et al as the target audience is extremely unlikely to have such 
Operating Systems.

>   You must not assume that
>title generates a popup, or that "popup" makes any sense.

In my earlier email I pointed out that these title attributes don't 
work for everyone.

>I hope this is teaching something other than HTML authoring.  In which
>case, I wonder why you don't use Microsoft Help as your authoring
>format.

Indeed - it's teaching MS Word in this instance. People will attend a 
hands-on course and the HTML pages are available as a later reference.

>You should also think twice before teaching Microsoft Word in this way,
>as it will be very difficult to un-teach (like unstructured programming,
>and tag soup HTML) at a later date.  Word has a proper style sheet feature.

Definitely OT for this list: much as I certainly teach Styles for 
Word, Pagemaker and HTML there's still a need in Word to start off 
total beginners with the general concepts of selecting words etc and 
changing their format. I could say more, but this isn't the correct 
list.

>++ Also, if you introduce fonts, you need to introduce the concept of
>display and body text fonts.  Most beginners are likely to put body text
>in display fonts.

Excellent suggestion. Thank you.



Cheers,

Miraz


-- 
Miraz Jordan	              Internet Trainer, Macintosh trainer
mailto:miraz@firstbite.co.nz      http://www.firstbite.co.nz/training

Received on Sunday, 13 May 2001 15:33:16 UTC