- From: Daniel Burnett <burnett@nuance.com>
- Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2003 22:43:19 -0700
- To: "Richard Ishida" <ishida@w3.org>, "Martin Duerst" <duerst@w3.org>, <jim@larson-tech.com>, <luc.vantichelen@scansoft.com>
- Cc: <scott.mcglashan@pipebeach.com>, <jerry.carter@scansoft.com>, <paolo.baggia@loquendo.com>, <jk@us.ibm.com>, <www-archive@w3.org>, <w3c-i18n-ig@w3.org>
Folks, Here is my attempt to summarize the issues and/or positions around the bidi topic discussed Thursday. Please forgive me if I have misstated a position. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Motivation for this discussion: For accessibility reasons, many W3C markup languages are a) required to ensure that authors *can* write documents using the markup language in such a way as to *guarantee* that the content of the document can be rendered visually, and b) encouraged to be designed in a way such that visual rendering of *any* content marked up with that language is possible. Of course, W3C has a strong interest in ensuring that their markup languages work equally well for all human languages in order to avoid unnecessary language/cultural bias and to provide the broadest usability for the specifications. Definition: Combinations of text segments from different human languages that are typically rendered visually in different directions (right-to-left or left-to-right) are referred to as bidirectional or bidi text. Martin's claims: (hope I got this right!) 1. Current algorithms to visually render bidi text using only a) the text itself and b) indications of the language of each segment are imperfect. 2. The addition of Unicode representations of text directionality to the above is still insufficient to render such text perfectly. 3. To ensure correct visual rendering of a marked-up document for all human languages, explicit directionality indicators must be provided as part of the markup (and hence be a part of the markup language itself). 4. Bidi controls in (X)HTML may provide this functionality for specifications that need it. SSML group claims/statements: 1. This is a general issue for many of W3C's specifications and is in no way unique to SSML. 2. Current solutions presented for this (e.g. XHTML elements/attributes) are incomplete because they were not designed to work for all XML-based specifications. 3. If important to W3C, this issue should be addressed by work that explicitly incorporates feedback and requirements from all specifications that may conceivably be expected to provide this functionality now or in the near future. It should *not* be done as a one-off discussion between the SSML group and the I18N group. 4. The SSML group will be happy to incorporate the results of any such comprehensive effort into its specifications when available. 5. It is irresponsible to the speech industry and W3C to require the development and/or implemention of non-comprehensive interim solutions for bidirectionality or to force the progress of the current specification to halt until the comprehensive effort described is complete. -- Dan Burnett SSML subgroup Chair
Received on Friday, 19 September 2003 01:43:31 UTC