Re: Initial Draft --Cascaded Speech Style Sheets

On Wed, 14 Feb 1996, Raman T. V. wrote:

> Keeping the audio and visual stylesheets orthogonal is not *silly* as you
> suggest.
> This is an important design goal, and I definitely do not intend doing a
> speech stylesheet mechanism that keys off the visual.
> 
> This said, <strong> is clearly independent of both visual and aural
> renderings.
> 
> Given that the visual stylesheet specifies to the browser how it should
> realize <strong> it's logical  to allow the speech stylesheet to do the same. 

You seem to mean complementary rather than orthogonal.  Complementarity 
is a good design goal, matching well with the machine independence that 
a good web document should have.  Complementarity means that the two 
carry the same information in different ways, while orthogonality implies 
total independence, which is not what most authors want.  You need to 
have different low-level functionality for visual and aural UAs, but the 
best design should attempt to make the low-level functionality 
transparent, so that the information the author wants to present in his 
pages is preserved in machine-independent form as much as possible.  

I agree that an aural stylesheet mechanism shouldn't key off a visual 
stylesheet; instead, they should be complementary, following from a 
combination of good descriptive markup and style-sheet prescriptions that 
convey machine-independent concepts as much as possible.  That is biggest 
advantage of a natural language approach to style parameters, rather than 
specifying machine-dependent numerical values.  If someone wants to 
distinguish some text, say by making it loud, it is much better to 
describe this with the word loud (which can be adjusted to the tastes of 
the user and capabilities of the machine) than with a fixed dB level.

David

Work: seibert@hep.physics.mcgill.ca         Home: 6420 36th Ave.
Physics Department, McGill University       Montreal, PQ, H1T 2Z5 
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Received on Thursday, 15 February 1996 10:38:37 UTC