Re: Success criteria speak for themselves

Hi Wayne,

in all politeness I would like to bring up some thoughts regarding this part of your message:

On 18 Feb 2014, at 21:09, Wayne Dick <waynedick@knowbility.org> wrote:

> The second HTML encoding simply italicizes the word hypotenuse using the HTML code <span style=”font-style: italic;”>hypotenuse</span>. It relies on human intelligence and fully sighted human vision to conclude that an italicized word within the context of a defining sentence identifies a definition relationship.  The fact that the particular italicized word represents a defined term within a definition relationship could not be determined by a program, because the program would have to understand English to determine that the author had defined a term. This is beyond the scope of computer programs.

[1] nothing wrong with relying on human intelligence - or am I missing something?

[2] a non-sighted user could be presented with the fact that to some content an attribute is applied that italicises the enclosed text, and thus sets it apart from the surrounding content; this is about the same amount of information a sighted user gets to know when consuming the content

[3] a sighted user would not benefit from the presence of the dfn tag, unless it is specifically presented to him - which also is not typical in most usage scenarios

[4] it does not really matter whether a program can determine whether some content is term to be defined or not - what is relevant is whether a person  - with or without disabilities - can access enough information to determine the meaning of the content, including the fact that a term might be subjected to a definition.

Disclaimer: I am not arguing for or against the meaningfulness or usefulness of tags in general, or specifically the dfn tag. I just disagree with some specificities in your reasoning.

Olaf