Liam's comments on Authoring Techniques for XHTML & HTML Internationalization 1.0, 9th October 2003 draft

Some quick comments on:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/WD-i18n-html-tech-20031009/


[1]
"How to use this docuemnts" tells people to "click on icons", is there
an accessibility issue there?  The icons don't have tooltips -- maybe
they need alt and title attribtes.  I had no a priori idea what they did.

[2] 2.2 item 2
In case of conflict, the Content-Type charset declaration and the XML
declaration have precedence over the meta charset statement, according
to the HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 specifications. [Ed. note: Is this true
in practise? esp wrt IE?]

It's true neither in practise nor according to the XML specification.
The HTTP Mime charset parameter overrides the encoding (if any) given
in any XML declaration. 

[3] 2.2 further down (it'd help if the itens were numbered)
The meta declaration must only be used when the character encoding is
organized such that ASCII-valued bytes stand for ASCII characters (at
least until the meta element is parsed). [Ed. note: How true is this?]

If you send a document in ebcdic to IE, a meta element isn't going to
help you.  IE won't be able to parse the "<" sign let alone "M" "E" "T"
"A" :-)


[4] NNavigator

Probably you should use Mozila, not Netscape Navigator, now that
Netscape has disbanded its browser team.

[5] 3.2 Specifying...

According to the HTML specification, in a case of conflict the HTTP
charset declaration has the highest priority of all means of declaring
the character set.

Correct.  Please make 2.2 consistent with this.

[6] 3.3 Avoid escapes when the characters to be expressed are
representable in the character encoding of the document.

Why?  It can be very convenient in some environments, for example, to
stick to 7-bit ("ASCII") values and to use character references for
all codpoints that require 8 or more bits.  This can make document
transportation and processing significantly more robust.

[7] 3.3

Suggest ading a note about where character references can be used --
e.g. you can't use them to escape characters in element names.
Maybe not necessary.

[8] 6.5

Suggest documenting interaction with <span> and inline bidi text;
RTL and LTR marks are evil becasue non-hierarchical and stateful.

[9] 6.7 Overriding
in the example box, the Hebrew text is in three different sizes or fonts in
the three places it appears.  Very minor and probably a browser bug.

[1] Overall
As the draft is edited further, it might be an idea to reduce some of
the redundancy and combine some of the topics.  E.g. logical vs visual
order for Hebrew, dir="rtl" to html or body.  Repeated text can make
people think they lost their place, or can mean people read the
wrong section or get confused.

*

I hope these comments help - I think this will be a very useful
document and look forward to seeing future drafts!

Liam





-- 
Liam Quin, W3C XML Activity Lead, liam at w3.org, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/

Received on Friday, 10 October 2003 11:14:32 UTC