Re: Control Text-file Embedding in HTML-docs

Tina Holmboe wrote:
>   XHTML 2 gives the power to split entire paragraphs of text out, and
>   I'm damned if I can see how good alternatives will be provided without
>   including /exactly/ the same content in the document itself.
>
>   
>   
I suspect I have exacerbated the problem here by using a poor example.  
The intent of a universal @src is not really so you end up duplicating 
fallback content for paragraphs.  Obviously you *could* do this, but 
just because you *can* do a thing does not mean you *should* do a thing. 

The intent of @src is to couple it with its associated attributes 
@srctype and @encoding to provide for a general purpose fallback 
mechanism.  I suppose it could be argued that this is generalism run 
amok, but...  at the core of this generalization is the assertion from 
the I18N community and the accessibility community that @longdesc from 
HTML 4 / XHTML 1.* is inadequate.   There needs to be a way to provide 
rich descriptive content in appropriate formats; where the formats 
selected based upon what the author has offered and what the consumer 
can handle. 

The HTML 4 object element was a start at addressing this issue, but had 
some shortcomings and was not felt to be sufficiently generalized nor 
sufficiently semantically rich.  By exposing these attributes and their 
behavior everywhere, the content author can have very fine grained 
control over what gets delivered.

And, just to be clear, this is NOT frames.  It is more like IMG with 
fallback behavior.  If you want to see the future of frames, check out 
the xframes spec.  I know the current draft is over a year old, but it 
is still on the list of (X)HTML Working Group tasks.

-- 
Shane P. McCarron                          Phone: +1 763 786-8160 x120
Managing Director                            Fax: +1 763 786-8180
ApTest Minnesota                            Inet: shane@aptest.com

Received on Saturday, 31 March 2007 16:27:10 UTC