Paul Prescod wrote:

 > HTML is at about the right point in the abstraction->rendition spectrum to
 > allow braille, TTYs and other non-GUI interfaces to render information in
 > a manner compatible with GUI interfaces. We cannot make a global language
 > much more abstract HTML (though footnotes, headers, footers, etc. would be
 > nice). We cannot make a multiple-media language much less abstract than
 > HTML. 
 > 
 > Håkon's point is that formatting objects are less abstract than HTML and
 > are thus less portable.

This is well stated.

 > Transmitting XHTML probably does not make sense when we could instead get
 > the client to do the transformation. I think we can all agree on that.

Yes. But how will you make existing browsers perform transformations?

 > Transforming to XHTML+STYLE-based CSS on the client side probably also
 > does not make sense because the STYLE attribute is too granular to be
 > generated by XSL. Do we agree?

No. If you or your software can concatenate "12" and "pt", you/it should
also be able to concatenate "font-size:", "12", "pt", and ";".

 > Formatting objects (as currently defined) have the concrete limitation
 > that they are probably not compatible with non-GUI rendering environments.
 > (I'm no Braille expert -- is this right or not?)

Visual formatting objects bring braille a decade back to the "screen
reader" state.

-h&kon

Håkon Wium Lie             http://www.operasoftware.com/people/howcome
howcome@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx                      simply a better browser


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