I know of no uses other than browser plug-ins. For microformats in
general, browser plugins (or other user-agent behavior--at one point
there was talk of supporting microformats in FF3 without a plugin, but
it didn't make it in) are the most common use case.
I know of no way for you to auto-detect if a user-agent wants to do
something COinS, and I think requiring a user to manually turn it on in
some kind of OL preferences would largely defeat the purpose of it.
So it's a trade-off, at this point. Is possible interference with some
screen-reading user-agents of enough concern to outweigh the potential
utility of COinS?
Either way, as a bunch of us have been saying, we reccommend that you
don't _limit_ your efforts to provide machine-discoverable/usable
representations of your citations to COinS. I think it is useful, but
not sufficient. But supporting LibX for redirection to my link resolver
to retrieve library services for the citation is a VERY useful use case
to me and my patrons.
Incidentally, unAPI suffers from the same potential problem with some
screen-reading user-agents, being based on the <abbr> tag. Zotero uses
unAPI (as well as COins), but oh well, same thing.
Apparently RDFa does not suffer from the same problems, I've heard. I
don't know enough about RDFa to know for sure, or to know how hard it
would be to implement a useful RDFa solution here. At present, LibX,
Zotero, etc., do not, as far as I know, use RDFa. But that's the future,
is my guess.
There are also other methods of auto-discovery of machine-readable data,
one I think suggested by Ed in this thread, that don't suffer from this
problem--but also won't currently be used by LibX, Zotero, etc.
Jonathan
Michael Ang wrote:
Hmm so there's no implementation of COinS that doesn't interfere with
screen readers that have "read title tag" turned on?
It sounds like that isn't the default setting in JAWS but some people do
turn it on: http://www.standards-schmandards.com/2005/browsing-habits/
Are there automated (e.g. NOT a browser plugin) uses of COinS? I'm not
talking theoretical use but actual bots/spiders/import scripts. One way
we could support COinS on OL would be for COinS users to explicitly turn
it on. Or possibly it could be automatic if we detect COinS support
(maybe it's passed in the browser agent?)
- mang
Not that I know of.
You can say display:none, but that'll probably hide it from LibX etc too.
What is needed is a CSS @media for screen readers, like one exists for
'print'. So you could have a seperate stylesheet for screenreaders, like
you can have a seperate stylesheet for print. That would be the right
way to do it.
But doesn't exist.
Jonathan
Thomas Dowling wrote:
On 12/04/2008 02:02 PM, Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
Yeah, I had recently noticed indepedently, been unhappy with the way a
COinS "title" shows up in mouse-overs, and is reccommended to be used
by
screen readers. Oops.
By any chance, do current screen readers honor something like '<span
class="Z3988" style="speak:none" title=...>'?
--
Jonathan Rochkind
Digital Services Software Engineer
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886
rochkind (at) jhu.edu
--
Jonathan Rochkind
Digital Services Software Engineer
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886
rochkind (at) jhu.edu
