Re: SVG 1.2 Comment: Detailed last call comments (all chapters)

> 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