Re: storing info in XSL-FO: new issue? [was: Draft TAG Finding:...]

At 10:31 PM +0200 8/19/02, Håkon Wium Lie wrote:

>Please tell us on what basis braille software should contract words or
>not given arbitrary XML.
>

Not knowing anything significant about Braille, I have no clue. Paul 
Prescod's suggested one way. Whether it works or not, I don't know. I 
suppose you could define an xbraille:contract attribute in a 
particular namespace, and I suspect it would get the same adoption 
the HTML var element has. It might even be more generally useful 
since it would denote the specific issue of Braille contractibility, 
rather than overloading an element whose defined and officially 
endorsed semantics are something completely different. ("VAR: 
indicates an instance of a variable or program argument.")  Is there 
any time you might want to contract a program variable? Is there any 
time you might want to not contract something that isn't a program 
variable?

But even granting that you might not be able to determine this 
conclusively in XML, that does not mean an HTML document has more 
useful information in its markup than an XML equivalent. Braille 
contractibility is one datum. You need to consider the sum total of 
all the information in all the markup. HTML is extremely limited. It 
can tell you that you're looking at paragraphs, headings, tables, a 
few other things. That's it. XML can do all that and far more.
-- 

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
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|          XML in a  Nutshell, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly, 2002)          |
|              http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian2/              |
|  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0596002920/cafeaulaitA/  |
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Received on Monday, 19 August 2002 17:21:52 UTC