Re: ICADD support in HTML 2.0 - not urgent, not ready to go

yuri@sq.com
Tue, 6 Dec 94 12:59:05 EST

Dan writes, completely reasonably:
>
> There is _no_ prose in the spec that explains the SDA attributes.
> Folks are gonna go "what's this SDA cruft in the DTD?" I _guarantee_
> that I will get no less than 10 email messages on that topic, over and
> above the comments sent to the working group.
>
[...]
>
> So I have resigned myself to playing "help desk" on this issue.
>
> But the right thing to do is to put something in the spec -- at least
> an appendix -- that motivates the ICADD stuff. Such a blurb would (1)
> reach a lot more folks than the sparse comments in the DTD, and (2)
> save me about 10% of the idiot mail.
>

I wrote an appendix explaining these attributes for ISO 12083 and
will check to see whether there is any reason why I can't simply pare
that down into an appendix for HTML 2.0 (that is, whether the ISO
copyright might force me to rewrite rather than self-plagiarize).

That is to say, I'm volunteering to write an appendix.

As various people have mentioned, ICADD transformation is common practice
now and I agree with all the arguments for keeping it in.

Just for the record: There
are several good reasons why #FIXED attributes were used instead of
all the options -- and yes, we seriously considered LINK and DSSSL;
the location model in ICADD owes a little to each -- and it seems
that the overwhelming reason, the political one, worked: By making
ICADD attributes "part" of a DTD/application, several people have
found that it is considerably easier to get funding to include them
as part of DTD development. Our concern in the ICADD committee was
to not give DTD owners as easy way to say "Oh we'll just deal with
the SDA transformation later in this separate file/converter/filter,
etc."

I agree with everyone who thinks it would have been more efficient/cleaner/
whatever to not have one fixed Braille/largeprint/voice transformation
built into the DTD. However, in practice, this turns out to have been
one of our wisest decisions.

Yuri

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