RE: XHTML 2.0 Architectural/Accessibility Issues

Sean wrote: 
> * Listing vs. grouping vs. sectioning vs. paragraphing vs. theming

> Inline lists have been raised in many fora. This is a step in the
> right direction; as Al said (something like): "elements are for what
> they do, not where they go". I'd like to add that they're also not for
> what they look like, or how they render in any modality. The bottom
> line, as TimBL put it, is to "say what you mean, rather than what you
> want done with it". 

Sighted readers infer semantics from visual presentation.
a,b,c and d infer a choice class of information.
Breaks in text (para class of presentation)infer some level of change
in subject matter.
That's historically true, but still relevant.




> * Annotations, linking sections together
> 
> Following on from general "metadata", the GL group have often
> expressed needs for:-
> 
>    *** Associating images with text, and stating a precise
> relationship
>    *** Providing annotations of content for semantic pragmatics, etc.
>    *** Being able to provide labels for form mechanisms etc.
> 
> This is generally termed as "annotation". RDF provides an excellent
> way to make annotations, but it means canonicalizing that link to the
> metadata. It means making it as standard as rel="stylesheet" is now;
> which is probably a good thing.
> 
> Annotation can also help when adding metadata about the varieties of
> content of different modalities, 

That worries me. the link, rel="stylesheet" is reputedly something James
Clark threw together to fill a gap. 

I still like the structural association

<mediaObject>
  <media1form linkToIt="url"/>
  <media2form linkToIt="url"/>
  <media3form>
         <inLineContent>....</
  </media3Form>
</mediaObject>




> 
> * Content of different modalities
> 
> cf. http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-gl/2001JulSep/1000
> - The Alt/Object Problem
> 
> MIME types are getting to be more and more redundant (in that they
> should be replaced with URIs) as time goes on, and genericity of
> documents is an important factor. Consider fragment identifiers on a
> document that is an audio run. The media type might be MP3, RAM, or
> even an HTML transcript. The reference to "one minute into the audio"
> should be the same across content types.

Nice one. xpointer for smil?
Are you looking for common syntax here Sean?




> * Classes, IDs, extensions. Extra semantics: action item, poem
> 
> If someone wants (traditionally) to ascribe extra semantics to a set
> of elements, they have to use the "class" attribute. There is a
> problem with that in that there is no way to define what this new
> class means. It would be possible to come up with an RDF Schema that
> people could follow to define what the new classes mean. It would then
> be possible to retrieve this definition, using the afforementioned
> metadata linking mechanism.

This smacks of changing the problem domain.
If an application goes digging around a website, it might come up
with one or many words to replace the contents of the class attribute
with other words. The problem then is interpreting those words.
surely the real problem is semantic interpretation of the contents of
the class attribute.



Regards Dave
 ********* snip here **************


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Received on Wednesday, 2 January 2002 04:41:05 UTC