Re: "phonemes" property in the CSS3 Speech module

To my mind a certain amount of this discussion seems beyond the scope of
markup and styling. The user agent ought to determine things like the
difference between present tense "read" (rhymes with reed) and past tense
"read" (rhymes with red) based on context. If Google Translate and Microsoft
Word can understand human language grammar, there's no reason a browser
couldn't do it.

Also, no-one is going to bother to mark up which tense they have put their
verbs in, or which dialect their vegetable names belong to!

As an aside, how would we standardise and define dialects? There are huge
variations within just UK regions and socio-economic groups -- let alone
India, America, Australia...

Regarding "one-offs" I favour the following form:

 I <x speak="rɛd">read</x> it.
 [speak] {phonemes: attr("speak", string)}

For example in a sentence like, "Despite many attempts at correction, he
continued to pronounce <x speak="rēd">read</x> as <x speak="rɛd">red</x> ".

Or: "Do you say <x speak="skoʊn">scone</x> or <x speak="skɒn">scone</x>?"

I think the idea of using a class or ID to specify things like
"present-tense-read" comes close to presentational markup -- somewhat akin
to when the start attribute was removed (or slated for removal) from the OL
element, meaning authors would have had to so something like <ol
class="start-4"> or something similar.

--
Mark Kenny
Twitter: @beingmrkenny