- From: Martin Duerst <duerst@w3.org>
- Date: Fri, 19 Sep 2003 10:39:17 -0400
- To: "Daniel Burnett" <burnett@nuance.com>, "Richard Ishida" <ishida@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>
Hello Daniel, Very good summary. Just some comments: At 22:43 03/09/18 -0700, Daniel Burnett wrote: >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. I guess you mean the bidi formatting codes provided by Unicode. The problem is not that they are not adequate for rendering bidi text ('perfectly'), e.g. for plain text; the problem is that they can interact very badly with markup, leading to things very similar to <i><b></i></b> crappy HTML examples. >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. Correct. >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. They were not explicitly designed for all XML-based specifications, but they would still work easily with an extremely broad range of XML 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. I do not think that the current XHTML solution is in any way significant way non-comprehensive. I also do not believe that any 'comprehensive effort' will lead to a proposal that is significantly different from the current XHTML solution. Regards, Martin.
Received on Friday, 19 September 2003 10:50:26 UTC