[thelist] semantic markup
Diane Soini
dianesoini at earthlink.net
Thu Jun 3 21:42:14 CDT 2004
On Thursday, June 3, 2004, at 11:49 AM, thelist-request at lists.evolt.org
wrote:
>
>
>>
>> I am wondering, however, what is there out there that actually only
>> reads a web page in its strictest semantic form? And how exactly would
>> it stumble over a <b> tag as opposed to an <em> tag. I would like to
>> try this thing out and run some tests.
>>
>
> For example, if you reckon your page will be accessed by a screen
> reader, then maybe you'll realise there's quite some difference between
> that something than simply looks <bold> and something that is <strong>
I know there are screen readers, but are those the only readers of html
that require semantic tag? Are those the only devices that will read an
html document in a strictly semantic fashion?
I've never used a screen reader. Do they really stumble on <b> tags? I
would think that they would have built the ability to read such a
common tag into the software. I'm not trying to be argumentative on
whether <b> tags are ok. I understand the argument completely, but I do
wonder about the assumptions made, such as that there are devices out
there, other than screen readers, that will stumble on a non-semantic
document. If those devices exist, what are they and where can I see
one? I want to see what that looks like.
> Not much so far, but there's this:
> http://www.w3.org/2003/12/semantic-extractor.html
Ah, here is something, but I get a lot of java exceptions trying it
out. On those pages I did get to work, it doesn't seem to work like I
would expect. I tested Jeff Zeldman's site, figuring it ought to be
pretty close to perfect. The extractor didn't extract much.
Anyway, I think it is an interesting conversation. I'm not much into
flame wars on <b> vs <strong>, but more on questioning some of the
dogma about certain sematic tags being somehow more appropriate for
user interface components than others. For example, in java swing you
use would use classes like JMenuBar or JToolBar, but in HTML the
convention of the moment seems to be to use <li>.
Now something like JMenuBar is pretty darn clear to me what it is, but
<li> is not clear to me to be a menu bar. My only concern is that I do
not think <li> is more semantically correct for a menu bar than some
other methods because what we are talking about is not an unordered
bullet list in the middle of some prose document, but a user interface
component. A user interface component also has a language of context
and meaning. Therefore to say that <li> is somehow more correct than a
<table> (yeah, I know--please don't go there) is kinda silly. Neither
are semantically proper or semantically perfect as far as I'm
concerned. Neither describes a user interface element.
I'm merely questioning the belief that one method is actually more
correct than another when the markup language was not invented with
user interface components in mind, but with prose documents in mind.
It would be nice if we could use XUL, but we can't at the moment for
general web content. I sure hope that a standard can come out of this
need so that we don't have to stumble around like this for much longer.
Diane
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