From PF: extract from minutes telecon

Daniel: Al, do you want to recap your recent post [about XHTML 2]?

Al:  er, not sure I can do that.  Let's try this:  XHTML 2.0 is our first
chance to make functional upgrades in HTML.  We need to be stepping back
and looking for those functions that aren't working [in HTML 4 + WCAG] as
well as we think they need to, and see if we can come up with a better
solution in the format.  

Two major themes in my mind at the moment in this regard: top down
decomposition, and unarticulated context dependencies.  Top-down
decomposition issues come to a head in the current debate in UAWG over the
orientation and navigation checkpoints.  Would like to have better
signposts for the User Agent to follow in constructing and exposing an
intra-page table of contents than there are now.  

Unarticulated context dependencies are like what we addressed by adding
HEADERS attribute to directly link TD to its related TH cells.  The absense
of this kind of clear identification of the immediate logical context of
active elements comes up again and again, from "click here" for link text
to the overly cryptic field labels that failed to communicate the questions
to Kelly Ford's friends in the football pool (see post from earlier in the
day).  The solution to this problem seems to involve a structure with a
graph topology, as opposed to the tree topology of the top-down decomposition.

...

Daniel:  Is there going to be a "architecture" developed to re-engineer and
replace the 'object' element type?  Something like X-Link where the basic
framework is in place but people can declare their own specialized versions
based on what is given?

Mimasa:  The HTML Working Group in their July face to face looked at just
taking the SWITCH construct from SMIL.  But it has very multimedia-specific
features like system-bitrate.  Not acceptable as is.  But a solution for
content control is sought.

Daniel:  But Murray Altheim seemed to be hot on the architecture approach
when we met back in January.  

Mimasa:  Murray is no longer working on the HTML Working Group.

Al:  Whatever is worked out for content control, WAI is very interested in
it; we depend a lot on the ability to provide equivalent alternatives for
medium-specific or sense-specific data.

Received on Tuesday, 10 October 2000 09:17:40 UTC