- From: David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>
- Date: Thu, 4 Nov 2004 07:46:33 +0000 (GMT)
- To: www-svg@w3.org
> One more comment about accessibility. If you have text, then use a > text-oriented markup language such as XHTML. But if you have graphics, your But that doesn't seem to be how the run of the mill commercial web site developer (or even Word document writer) thinks, and is one of my main concerns about SVG. Look at almost any commercial web site and you will see that they are trying to use HTML as a graphics language (a page description language) with little regard to semantic markup, sensible reading orders, representing text with text, etc. I think the only things that are preventing a total collapse into randomly pasted up text fragments in SVG is that SVG renderers are not pre-installed on consumer PCs (and the authors are not technically enough aware to realise it exists and could be used in that way - a large proportion of commercial HTML is still clearly written by people copying other people). Commercial web sites are designed by (historically: would be) graphic artists, not by writers. They are largely advertisements, and modern advertisements have much form and very little content. Even if you take PDF, about half the PDF documents I see are generated from Microsoft Word, and most authors use Word presentationally (no styles, tabbing round line endings, filling out pages with newlines, etc.). They don't go through multiple levels moving from semantic to presentational - they are directly composed in presentational form. There is also a strong single tool psychology, e.g. redirects get done with meta-refresh, in spite of the HTML specification saying you should not do this. That's because to do otherwise would require learning HTTP and the web server.
Received on Thursday, 4 November 2004 07:56:15 UTC