Re: Non-editorial issues raised by Eric Hansen

At 09:11 AM 11/24/99 -0500, Ian Jacobs wrote:
>
>More minor:
> -  "Braille" or "braille"?

What was the consensus the last time this came up?  [Is_Editorial IMHO].

> - Issue #13: Is braille accepted as a natural language? 

Braille is not its own language.  Braille is a class of presentation
encodings used for a wide variety of natural languages.  So, Braille text
is (in the context of markup languages) informal, natural language text.
What is the document phraseology that was being commented on?

> - Is braille also haptic?

Technically, there is a way to say yes, but pedagogically, the best answer
is "if you are talking about Braille, call it 'tactile' as opposed to
'haptic' because that is a better, more informative and more widely
recognized, description.

If you are talking about Haptic communication, the tactile sensations
employed in Braille may be included without adding "and tactile."  But if
you are talking about Braille, don't confuse people by calling it 'haptic.'

[BTW, this is an example where grabbing Eric's documents, enriching them
with named anchors to form link targets, and mounting the result on the UA
website as resources for the issues list would be helpful.  I don't feel I
really understand Eric's comment from the summary here, but I am loathe to
take the time to dig it out of the email archive just to find out for a
question at this level.]

Al

Received on Wednesday, 24 November 1999 10:27:17 UTC