Tab Atkins Jr. ha scritto:
On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 4:48 PM, Calogero Alex Baldacchino
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
[cut]
We don't have to touch parsing at all to accomplish essentially this.The issue
you're worried about is getting crazy semantics applied to
individual letters. Semantic parsers (which honestly the average
browser is *not*) can easily just ignore the semantic value of <b> or
<small> or <i> when they don't wrap a full word, assuming that the use
is either stylistic or too complex/subtle to easily capture.
Well, such is a 'semantic' solution equivalent to leaving all to the
implementation; a 'parsing' solution would solve the 'problem' at the
bottom, but I acknowledge the question is too marginal to be seriously
taken into account.
Agree to disagree, I guess. I don't find "We hope you'll find <b>Product
A</b> to be the best laundry detergent you've ever used!" to be denoting
emphasis or importance, really.
I think 'Product A' is the core of the message, the thing some people are
trying to sell you, the name you *must* remember when you want to by a
laundry detergent, so those people become rich. The bold presentation aims
to capture your attention and keep your eyes on it a bit longer; on a
tv/radio spot the name of the product would be spoken out with some
isolation, with at least a bit of emphasis, for the same reasons. It denotes
importance meaning you need to pay a special attention to it in order to
understand *what the author wants you to understand*. I think that the same
semantics can be expressed by <strong>, since the importance of a piece of
text is not (only) in its meaning, or in the message overall meaning, or in
one's way to take it as important or not, but (also, or mainly) in the
author's intention to mark it as different from the rest of the content, as
a reading key, to drive your attention and as well your thoughts (ok, that's
like saying that truth is a chimera, but such can be a crude truth :-P ).
If I was contrasting Product A with another item, I could perhaps
agree. But we're not, so I don't. ^_^ However, we're obviously
splitting hairs here.
But you're implicitly contrasting 'Product A' with a bounce of generic
items, all items of the same category your potential buyer might happen
to know (I think this needs some clarification with one example, I guess
you were referring to comparative advertising, which has not been legal
in Italy for several years, so what you wrote - with some makup - has
always been one of the most common advertisement here). Anyway, I agree
we're splitting hairs, but there's some reason for me to push those
concepts, and I hope I'll be able to make it clear.
Well, a foreign-language word, specially if correctly pronounced (by someone
else), can be more or less hard to 'catch', so a bit of emphasis in its
pronounce might help the listener to correctly distinguish sounds.
That's stretching quite a bit more than I think is appropriate. Just
because I use a foreign phrase, does not mean that I'm emphasizing it.
If I, in audible speech, would put a bit of inflection on the phrase,
that still doesn't mean I'm emphasizing it in anything like the way I
emphasize "I'm <em>not</em> going to the dance with you!".
Isn't a bit of inflection also a bit of emphasis in pronounce? Perhaps
I'm misusing the English term; that sounded correct at me in a wider
sense, but I'll leave that concept, or modify it...
In other words, at most I might slightly stylistically offset the
phrase from my surrounding spoken words, but I wouldn't be
*emphasizing* them. So the <i> semantics are correct here. ^_^
After all, most of times bold and italicized texts (try and) reflect our way to
pronounce sentences, with more or less isolation, more or less emphasis,
quicker or slower, so changing their meaning, telling the listener that any
part requires a greater or a lesser attention, is somehow 'special', with
somehow different grades of 'speciality'. From this point of view, I think
either <b>/<i> can be semantically the very same thing as <strong>/<em>, or
their semantic should be redefined so to indicate a different (and lower)
grade of 'speciality' on the same "speciality scale", but not as a different
kind of 'speciality' (i.e., <b>-text stands out for some - opaque - reason
which has nothing in common with <strong>-text).
You're overreaching your definition of "importance" and "emphasis". I
don't think it's valuable to denote *everything* that is in some way
special as important or emphatic - you lose a sense of scale. If you
wish to define the words as such, then sure, <b> and <i> are lesser
grades of importance and emphasis by definition. By more conventional
definitions, though, they're not, and their stated semantics are fine.
Ok, let's define 'special' in a more correct manner. What should be a
slight offset? What does 'outstanding for some reason' mean, in a less
ambigous definition? How should the offset be interpreted by the user
agent? Is there any valid and exact metering for the offset? Since, by
default, <b> and <i> have the same typographic semantisc as <strong> and
<em>, but we're giving them a different semantics in general, let's
consider them from a non graphical point of view, i.e. that of a
screenreader, or a speech engine in general, and let's disregard the
state of the art for such softwares, since I'm going into a somewhat
formal question outstanding from the mere aural context. How should our
'non-human reader' interpret a <b>/<i> element? Is it ok to tell it can
be dealt with the same way as a <strong>/<em> element? Well, if they're
the same thing (but we wish they're not), perhaps we don't need
redundancy here. Is it fine to tell the <b>/<i> semantics can be
compared to that of <strong>/<em> on a scale where the <b>/<i> element
occupies an intermediate level? Ok, let's point this out so that, by
default, the reading bot can meaningfully set its parameters at the mean
point between spoken plain text and spoken emphasized/important text. Is
it better to state they can be set at different levels on that scale for
different purposes? Ok, let's define when it occurs and why and what's
the exact level corresponding to every and each case (that is, let's add
a specific attribute with a set of predefined values, but perhaps such
would be accomplished better through aural properties, and anyway would
lead to an untrivial linguistic analysis). Is it better to say they're
just different? Ok, but can we define what such should mean? what they
are exactly? Does 'different' mean they're sometimes close together with
<strong>/<em>, other times they're similar but closer to plain text, or
at an intermediate level, while some other time they're something just
different, non-important, non-enphasized, yet requiring a different
inflection we can't evaluate before knowing the meaning of the text? If
so, let's stop everyone! We're running into big troubles... at least on
a formal pathway. The latter case defines a context-dependent semantic,
which is good for a human being reading a text, because human beings
uses natural languages and natural languages are strongly context
dependet; it might also be good for a sentient bot, which would have a
certain degree of artificial intelligence enabling it to disambiguish
the language by understanding the context; but that's not good for HTML.
By definition, HTML is definetly a programming language, and a
programming language have to be context-free, but it seems to me that
<b> and <i> are context-free just in their typographic semantics (the
chance to modify such semantics via style sheets doesn't matter, from
this point of view, since that's a consistent redefinition). Unless we
anchored their semantics to another well defined one, establishing a
somewhat relationship to make their existance meaningful and not just
redundant -- and I was suggesting the idea that if <strong> expresses
'strong importance', <b> could express a 'lesser importance then
<strong> text' or a 'relevance as attention focus or content outlining,
helpful to improve the message understanding or to recall its theme,
usually rendered with bold text and possibly requiring a voice
inflection different from normal prose but not so incisive as very
important content' (as an article abstract or some keywords could be
classified), and if <em> expresses 'strong emphasis', <i> could express
'lesser emphasis than <em> text' or 'some change in the message context
or its precisation, with respect to either its meaning or its linguistic
constraints, usually rendered with italicized text and a bit of voice
inflection' (as a foreign language word or a taxonomy name could indicate).
In other words, I'm not concerning whether the actual semantics of <b>
and <i> is consistent with common uses of italicized and bold text, and
with their conventional definitions (human-understandable, but perhaps
not machine-friendly), but whether that's well defined (context-free)
with respect to a user agent capabilities to correctly interpret and
present them. Visually that's painless, but non visually (non
graphically) I'm quite feeling the need for a greater context-freedom
(at least binding them to some more precise semantics, with respect to
which to scale <b> and <i> semantics and make them more context-free).
Anyway, I'm not against a possible redefinition of <b> and <small>
semantics, but just aiming to deeply explore any alternative (such
as introducing new elements) while the specifications are in their
draft state. Just trying to give an alternative point of view with
some valid argumentations, if I can find some, nothing more (and
hope I'm not giving a different impression). Best regards.
No problem. Just because I disagree doesn't mean we can't argue. ^_^
~TJ
Ok, let's argue ^_^
Now I'll throw in an even creazier idea. Let's maintain everything as is,
and let's add two new elements the semantics of 'outstanding' and 'aside',
which works as meta informations, i.e. they have no default style (or a
default such as 'display:inline' and all the rest, but aureal properties, is
inherited from the parent element) and ignore any style direclty set on
them, but aureal styles, so they are ignored by any author not caring of
them, but act as a shortcut for basic aureal behaviour for authors caring
insteed, but not willing to create a whole aureal sheet, and can be helpful
for an assistive software, regardless its support for aureal sheets, since
their basic semantics is used as a hint on what to do despite any visual
styling of the inner content (and of any inner <small>, <b>, <strong>, and
so on).
I'm not an accessibility maven, so I have no idea whether this would
be useful or not. I suspect, though, that having a special kind of
emphasis that you use *only* when you want to denote something aurally
but not visually is such an extreme niche case that it doesn't matter
(it sounds incoherent to me, actually). If you know and care enough
about accessibility to *use* elements that will only have an effect on
aural browsers, you know and care enough about it to set up your CSS
appropriately.
~TJ
Well, I told you it was a crazy idea ^_^ (and of course a niche use, but
the aural features were just a stylish hint, because they're usually
ignored, while a semantic-only element could be more helpful, for
assistive technologies, than typography-related ones, but a
semantic-only element - specifically targeting to non-visual
environments - could be as bad as a typographic-only one, since would be
as well poor of generality, so a real division between content and
presentation - like media-targeted CSS can provide - would be favourable).
Alex.
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