- From: Peter Sorotokin <psorotok@adobe.com>
- Date: Thu, 04 Nov 2004 10:21:38 -0800
- To: David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>, www-svg@w3.org
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