Re: Reconsider SVG 1.2

> It's a semantic rendering language, the semantics are in the rendering, if 

At that level, you can call almost anything semantic and "semantic" loses
its meaning.  Other responders understood what I meant.

> User Style sheets are only an appropriate way to meet accessibility 
> requirements if the content isn't presentational, which SVG is, users cannot 
> style things with presentational semantics, it's simply impossible.

Most commercial HTML authors strive to use it as a purely presentational
language, but the PDF developers appear to have interpreted the 
legislative environment as requiring the addition of a document semantics
layer (essentially an HTML overlay) to their essentially** presentational
PDF language.  They even have tools that automatically extract that
information from MS Office originals.

For those who've never looked at tagged PDF, it applies the HTML overlay
by inserting semantic elements into the main structure, where there is no
structure class with the presentational elements, and maintaining a 
parallel, docment semantics tree to fill in the gaps where there are
structure clashes. 

** PDF guidelines have always required text to in a form that is easy to
extract, but the common route to PDF via Word ignored those guidelines.

Received on Friday, 19 November 2004 08:24:26 UTC