RE: Question about semantics & meaning of live text logo.

At 05:22 AM 2003-06-03, Lauke   PH wrote:

> > The main problem is that for most organisations the logo is
> > *very* important. Your method will only work in IE6, later
> > versions of Mozilla and Opera. :before  and :after
> > pseudoclasses aren't supported by IE5.5 or lower so the
> > information is lost for a large percentage of their potential
> > browser audience.
>
>Sorry, I should have mentioned that my solution was an
>"ideal world" scenario, more as a proof of concept than for
>deployment in a live (particularly commercial) situation.
>Disregarding the very valid point made, I'd be interested in
>knowing if the CSS approach is true to the spirit of
>structural markup.

In this case I would say it separates content from presentation at about the
right place.

Your "greater than" signs are not being used in the "greater than" sense but
rather as ASCII art, arrows framing and drawing attention to the text.
In that sense it is a "styling effect."

I would still not agglutenate 'logo' with 'textComposed' in the
'class' indication.  Remember there can be more than one
token in this attribute.  The user's presentation policies, how
verbose they want the presentation to be, for example, will
vary with the fact that this is a logo, whether you use a symbol
built up with CSS or an image with ALT and LONGDESC in addition.
So the fact that it plays the role of a logo, and the fact that it
is built up from text using CSS, are two independent class memberships
of this item.  Don't run them together; the selector logic works
better when separate aspects are separated in the class tokens.

** long answer

There is one problem with your question.

Saying that the buildup will be used as a Logo means two things:

a) graphically, it will be 'grouped' or made an atom, always used
the same wherever it is used.

b) it will be widely used to symbolize something that someone wants
to infiltrate into the recognition vocabulary of the people who see it.

This does not tell us what verbal story goes with the logo.

What words go with a logo depends on the entity represented, and the
verbal allusions in the logo art, and not just the fact that the
composite is used as a logo.

Mostly, the verbal story includes the verbal name of the entity that the
icon represents or alludes to.  But in the case of the logo for the Hongkong
and Shanghai Banking Corporation, there is a verbal story that goes with the
letters out of which the emblem is composed.

So with logos, as with all images, back off and ask "What's the story, here?"

Then let the text version tell the story.

[But by all means, let the text version clearly define and prioritize a
mercifully short form.  Most logo-mentions that are included in web pages
would not make the cut when editing/producing for radio.  And those radio
standards are our best predictor of what merits retention in screen reader
default presentation.]

  Bank of America image messaging analysis
  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/wai-tech-comments/2001Aug/0001.html

Al


>Patrick
>________________________________
>Patrick H. Lauke
>Webmaster / University of Salford
>http://www.salford.ac.uk

Received on Tuesday, 3 June 2003 09:34:35 UTC