Re: Phrase markup (was Re: Aural Cascading Style Sheets)

On Jan 10, 10:05am, Dave Raggett wrote:

> For instance, indicate that something is an acronym, abbreviation,
> a person's name etc. It makes sense in some cases to specify the
> long form as an attribute, e.g. one could write
>
>  <acronym for="Cascading Style Sheets">CSS</acronym>
>  <abbrev for="etcetera">etc.</abbrev>
>  <person fullname="David St.John Raggett">Dave</person>
>
> Note that GUI browsers could in principle use these attributes for
> balloon help when the mouse is held over the word in question.

Yes, good point. I recall lking the ability to add this level of simple
semantic markup in HTML 3.0draft.

In general, it seems that CSS is starting to need access
to the content of attributes, be they alt, for, lang, or whatever.
>
> If a name is from a different language then different pronunciation
> rules will apply, this can be handled via the language attribute, e.g.
>
>  <person lang=fr>Jean Fran&ccedil;ois Dupont</person>

Yes, it is worth stressing that language is a much more important
tag or attribute when using speech synthesis. It is easy to tell
que j'ecrire en Français pour un peu, and then switch to back to
English. A speech synth would get very confused without explicit markup.

> For really hard to pronounce phrases, perhaps its worth considering
> an attribute for specifying the pronunciation using the International
> Phonetic Alphabet. Can anyone give me a lead on how to represent
> IPC characters conveniently using ASCII?  Is there an agreed set
> of SGML entities?

No. I checked the full set of  8879:1986 defined entities. There is
however a block of characters for IPA in Unicode, from 0250 to 02AF,
so (assuming the attributes are declared CDATA and not NAME or
something) they could be used in an attribute by any Coagar-like or
i18N-aware DTD that allows characters with code-points above 255.



-- 
Chris Lilley, W3C                          [ http://www.w3.org/ ]
Graphics and Fonts Guy            The World Wide Web Consortium
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