- From: Nicholas Atkinson <nik@casawana.com>
- Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2002 01:44:19 +0100
- To: Tantek Çelik <tantek@cs.stanford.edu>, "Elliotte Rusty Harold" <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>, <www-tag@w3.org>, <www-style@w3.org>
The "prescriptive" approach of saying that everyone should use XHTML is one approach. However many people don't like being prescribed to! And one size doesn't fit all. Another approach, perhaps more "enabling", would be to say that we recognise that XML + CSS style only gives a UA _part_ of what it needs (it is not sufficient for accessibility, for instance), and that authors need some (machine-readable) way of publishing what their XML tags mean. UAs would be able to retrieve/cache this "XML Tag Description file" in the background and would be able to determine definitively that in a specific document "<headline>" is "a header" (provided that "a header" is one of an agreed set of "meanings" managed by a central authority or organisation such as the w3c). The UA would then be able to provide the appropriate accessible rendering. (and clearly there are other applications too.) All we would need is an agreed (presumably XML) syntax for this "Tag Description File" and, crucially, an agreed set of standard "meanings". This set of standard meanings could be far richer than the semantics that XHTML supports. Obviously, the more subtle the meaning, the less likely it is that it could possibly be agreed upon. But for meanings such as visual conventions like "a heading", or non-visual meanings such as "a patient", "a dentist", "a credit card number", "a longitude and latitude", "a temperature" or "a flight number" it is pretty clear-cut and unequivocal what they mean. Indeed we could have hierarchies of such meanings, or rather "ontologies". But hang on, such a "Tag Description File" already exists!!!! Isn't this the kind of thing that RDF can/could do. So, after that lengthy preamble, my point is that instead of going down the XHTML route (which doesn't lead anywhere) why don't we "cut to the chase" and go down the XML + CSS + RDF route. RDF (or something similar) could be used by UAs to determine the "missing knowledge" required to produce accessible renderings and in a whole host of other applications, because it would indicate to UAs what the tags "mean". Isn't that the whole point? nik ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tantek Çelik" <tantek@cs.stanford.edu> To: "Elliotte Rusty Harold" <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>; <www-tag@w3.org>; <www-style@w3.org> Sent: 19 August 2002 22:46 Subject: Re: What are Semantics? (Was: Serving generic XML) > > On 8/19/02 1:52 PM, "Elliotte Rusty Harold" <elharo@metalab.unc.edu> wrote: > > > > > At 1:29 PM -0700 8/19/02, Kynn Bartlett wrote: > > > > > >> If you make an arbitrary XML document, you cannot expect a browser to > >> determine that <headline> is supposed to be "a header" -- even if you > >> have visual presentation added on (via styles) which show that. > > > > Ah, but I can expect exactly that. And if a browser fails to do so > > then I say this is a flawed browser, > > LOL! > > You actually expect a UA to parse the English tag name "headline" and then > conclude it is a header, and then make similar conclusions for all other > valid XML tag names? > > This is because unambiguously parsing English and assigning meaning to > English words is a solved problem right? > > Please do some homework on the state of AI and Natural Language Processing > before making such ridiculous assertions. > > And never mind the fact that 90%+ folks in the world don't speak English. > Add "i18n" reading to your homework as well. > > > especially when it comes to > > accessibility. > > Previously in this thread you have said several provably false things > regarding accessibility. If you wish to add value regarding accessibility, > please add the following reading materials to your homework: > > http://www.w3.org/WAI/ > http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT > http://www.w3.org/TR/UAAG10 > http://www.w3.org/TR/ATAG10 > > and the documents linked from: > http://www.w3.org/WAI/Resources/ > > > If humans can recognize certain visual layouts as > > headers, then I think we should teach our computers to recognize them > > too. > > This is because computer vision is a solved problem right? Again, more AI > reading would help here, as I don't think you understand where the state of > the art is, nor how far it has to go. > > > Tantek >
Received on Monday, 19 August 2002 20:51:25 UTC