- From: John Foliot <jfoliot@stanford.edu>
- Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2006 15:33:42 -0700
- To: <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Leap Before You Look Dept.: ...or a second run on my earlier post. In the early days of HTML, semantic structure meant (to me, and every other developer I knew) that documents had a structural meaning to them: <h1>, <h2>, <p> and other block level elements applied a structure so that "semantically" the document could render in any user-agent, and the *meaning* of the text and it's relationship to other text on the page was clear. Structural semantics. However (as I sorta forgot in my haste to bang out a response), the W3C's "Semantic Web" is also about extending meaning to content beyond the basic page concepts; and in this sense microformats are indeed "Semantic" - it extends "meanings" at a machine level for re-purposing and use/re-use. Any unintended confusion by my part is apologized for. In the context of the discussion of web accessibility, while the first concept of "semantic" is important to AT (in a "...if it's a list, mark it as a list, don't make a table with 5 rows and 2 columns so that the first cell has a bullet and the second some text..." kind of way), the second concept of The Semantic Web has not yet (again, AFAIK) been taken up by developers and vendors of AT products - although that is an exciting idea in itself. And so while I whole-heartedly agree that "Semantic Web" constructs such as Microformats have their place, I still hope for and maintain that clear structural semantics (of the old school variety) are critical for the current (and foreseeable future) crop of alternative user-agents and Adaptive Technologies. What we don't need (IMHO) is a web where everything is simply a <div> with some extraneous Microformats style association added to it. RDF is cool and all, but there still needs to be a place for human consumable content... It's not all just machines talking to machines. The statement "...<div class="paragraph"> does not equal <p>..." still stands! Ya, that's what I meant... JF
Received on Friday, 6 October 2006 22:34:03 UTC