Thanks Jukka,
The views expressed by yourself, are the nearest to
mine,
It is important to define how we might most easily enfranchise the
powerless, the socially excluded, and the illiterate. W3C does not
appear to have a substantial representation for the disabled, and many
responses I get both publicly and privately indicate that the issues I
raise are not a concern of W3 but rather something that is do-able by
me independently, which is plainly ridiculous in view of the broad
range of needs.
XHTML, XML, XSLT, SVG and many other w3 technologies have excellent
theoretical possibilities, and are already used by those who have the
knowledge and power. Unfortunately they don't currently have the tools
which will enable, and there remains a reasonable doubt as to whether
the intention to enable is there.
It is excellent that xhtml should have strict definitions, provided
and only provided that better tools are available for authoring by
people who would have problems with html. where are those tools and
where is the evidence of effort to create them? we all know of issues
surrounding the meaning of alt and title, how much more serious is it
when < gets replaced by
<<FFFF,0000,0000!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC
"-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"><<0000,0000,FFFFhtml
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en"> for
someone who is dyslexic.
I personally take a strong exception to having to write
color, which appears ignorant to me in the English tradition, and at
best American Imperialism.
machine code has a place, and it should be kept there, not allowed out
in the wild.
On Saturday, February 1, 2003, at 07:45 AM, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
On Sat, 1 Feb 2003, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
On the other hand, the names of tags isn't very important -
they are
not meant to be read by people, but by machines (although it is meant
to be possible for people to read/write them) - and like C source code,
it isn't very much more meaningful for english speakers.
The element (sic) names - or generic identifiers, to be exact - are
meant
to convey a general idea of the meanings of markup constructs and,
besides, they are used in the definition of a markup system, or
"language"
as the misleading parlance goes. It is impossible to define what, say,
a < element means without referring to the element name.
Thus,
element names are meant to be readable and understandable to human
beings,
if only to authors. Whether they are written by humans, in the sense of
typing some characters, is relatively immaterial here.
They are important to anyone designing a user style sheet, too. To
tell my
browser to highlight all block quotations in some way I like, I need to
use the element name. - Similar considerations apply to attribute names
and keyword-like attribute values.
There are examples of actual confusion around element, attribute, and
value names, caused by the fact that not all people speak the same
dialect
of English. The < element is famous: roughly half of people who
try
to learn HTML seriously have mistaken it as meaning quotation. Partly
because the descriptions in the specifications have been (and are)
somewhat vague, but largely because of the tag name. To take another
example, British people have often complained about misspellings like
"color" (e.g. in <). Using CSS instead of
presentational
markup would naturally take this problem out of HTML, but not out of
the
authoring world. The are some naming decisions that might look a bit
headless: <, <, <, and <| all reflect the word
"head",
in confusingly similar but varying meanings, and < elements and
title attributes add to the confusion, and so does <<caption>, since
they
are heading-like too, but not _called_ headings.
However, I would suggest taking all of this as fait accompli.
Something to
be learned from for the future and in some general sense, not
something to
be fixed now in HTML. It's seldom a good idea to paint a car while it
is
in actual use, moving fast.
<excerpt>It is now possible, using XML Schemas, to create an xml
language where
the elements can be named/described in multiple languages. Using RDF
Ontology and Web Services we can expect it to be possible to write our
own version of "HTML" using whatever tags we like, declaring it's
relationship to HTML, and have it work
</excerpt>
I wonder what that would mean - in the worst case, everyone inventing
tags
of his own and "defining" them by providing a style sheet. There's
little
need to try and guess how many authors will pay the slightest
attention to
anything beyond _their_ fixed idea of how the page should look.
If it just means the possibility of _seeing_ tag and attribute names in
your preferred language, when viewing or editing HTML source, well,
_that_
could actually be implemented without much Xfuss and *logies.
--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
</excerpt>
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