RE: XML question

Paul Bohman wrote:

"It seems to me that XML is stripped of any useful structure..."

Reply:

Of course it is. That's the point: you decide on your own structure.

That said, XML provides an opportunity to break out of the HTML
straightjacket. For example, HTML provides a table tag. But that is really
more document structure than data structure. The same data might be better
structured in another way, but HTML forces it into a table (or maybe a
list).

It seems to me that screen readers should be built to recognize the
structure of the data itself, and to then permit the user to decide how that
structure should be represented on the user's computer. That way the user
has ultimate control.

But how to recognize data for what it is? Well, isn't this the point of RDF?
Isn't this the point of the entire Semantic Web?

So the solution to using screen readers directly with XML is to use RDF. But
that me be a while. In the meantime, use XSTL to transform XML into XHTML
for use with legacy screen readers.

Sincerely,
Charles F. Munat
Seattle, Washington

Received on Thursday, 24 May 2001 18:59:02 UTC