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

Yes. We cannot teach the world that semantic mark-up is better than 
presentational, etc. by handicapping W3C presentational mark-ups. Then 
people will simply not use W3C presentational mark-ups or abuse semantic 
mark-ups (that's what we have today). I think the solution is better 
styling/transformation of semantic mark-up into presentational layer. And 
things that are visual (ads) need to be expressed as presentational mark-up 
with alternate text describing them.

Peter

At 07:46 AM 11/4/2004 +0000, David Woolley wrote:

> > 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 18:22:07 UTC