Re: New Topic: HTML and the Visually Impaired [long]

Daniel W. Connolly (connolly@hal.com)
Wed, 31 Aug 94 13:15:37 EDT

In message <199408311703.KAA08112@rock>, Terry Allen writes:
>>For HTML 3.0, perhaps. But I'd rather see a separate DTD and a separate
>MIME content type.
>
>Why? The neat thing about this approach is that the same instance
>can be handled by Braille, etc, apps as well as all the present
>apps. that is, adding in the fixed attributes makes every
>instance ICADD-compliant. So no new MIME content type should
>be needed, HTML would be enough.

I don't think I made myself clear: I don't want to make

<ANCHOR HREF="lksdjf">...</ANCHOR>

part of HTML 2.0. If the markup looks like:

<A HREF="sdf">...</a>

and both camps can use it by adding fixed attributes, great!

But yuri wants WWW browser implementors to support all these alternative
names for HTML tags. If he wants to use ICADD names in the instance
markup, then he should create a new content type.

>(I'd rather the MIME type were SGML, but that's another matter.)

I've been around that bend. There are few, if any, contexts in which
an arbitrary SGML document can be consumed in a meaningful
way. Perhaps if everybody had something like EBT's Dynatext on their
desk (along with the publishing tools to convert SGML to their book
format...), and everybody exchanged stylesheets along with the SGML
documents, perhaps text/sgml would be a useful MIME content type.

Contrast this with text/html -- there are lots of tools to do meaningful
things with this data.

Dan