[css3-speech] Volume properties

Bert Bos:

>    http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-css3-speech-20110818/

The introductionary section 4 really helps CSS-savvy people to quickly grasp essential concepts, thanks.

Of course, only one dimension of the 2D visual box model – it’s 2½D if you count in ‘z-index’ and table layout – can map to the 1D aural box model. The editors chose the vertical domain (‘top’/ [‘middle’] / ‘bottom’) for the diagram over the horizontal (‘right’ / [‘center’] / ‘left’) and logical one (‘start’ / ‘end’), although they use the second set of logical terms (‘before’ / ‘after’), which makes sense, because we do only have ‘::before’ and ‘::after’ for runs of text, which are also 1D (although their consituents are 2D in visual media).

Hm, that became more a note to myself. Originally, I wanted to suggest to use ‘margin-before’ etc. instead, if that was agreed upon. A future Box module should cover all models and dimensions:
* 1D temporal                – t
* 1D linear                  – x
* 1½D temporal layers        – tv
* 1½D linear layers          – xv
* 2D planar                  – xy
* 2D marquee                 – tx
* 2½D planar layers          – xyv
* 2½D marquee layers         – txv
* 3D spatial                 – xyz
* 3½D temporal-planar layers – txyv
* 4D temporal-spatial        – txyz

The Speech module currently is “t”, but should probably become “tv” in the future, see below.

> The module contains the properties to style how a document is spoken by 
> a speech synthesizer: voice, volume, speed, pauses, cue sounds, etc.

I believe in level 4 this module should be split into two, separating aural and speech (synthesis) properties, because one might want to do, following Example XIII,

  @media aural { article#poem {
    content: url(Poem_performance.audio);
    audio-volume: soft;
  }}
  @media speech { article#poem {
    background: url(ambience.audio);
    volume: loud /* speech */ x-soft /* background */;
  }}

or

  …
    voice-volume: loud;
    voice-opacity: 80% /* or 0.8 */;
  }}

Therefore I think ‘volume-voice’ makes more sense than ‘voice-volume’, because then we can more consistently introduce a shorthand property ‘volume’ later.

PS: You could extend that example for other media

  @media print {article#poem {
    content: url(Poem_calligraphy.image);
  }}
  @media projection {article#poem {
    content: url(Poem_illustrated.animation);
  }}
  @media tv {article#poem {
    content: url(Poem_illustrated_performance.video);
  }}
  @media screen {article#poem {
    content: url(Poem_experience.app);
  }}

Received on Friday, 19 August 2011 13:08:42 UTC