Re: W3C recommends: Avoid ASCII Art

Lennert Stock (lst...@lstock.demon.nl) wrote:
: Read on http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/WD-WAI-PAGEAUTH-0203.html, the
: World Wide Web Consortium's new Web Accessibility Initiative Draft
: Guidelines:

: >6.[RECOMMENDED] 
: >Avoid ASCII art. Replace it with an image and alternative text.
: >Common typographic characters or constructions to be avoided are
: >emoticons, arrows consisting of dashes and greater than
: >signs (e.g., -->), etc.

Oh well, it was bound to happen. The philosophies behind ascii art and
HTML are so nearly opposite. The HTML standard puts emphasis on marking
the logical content of the document, and letting the browser take care
of the layout.

Ascii art, meanwhile, is almost purely layout - try feeding your favorite
ascii picture to a speech synthetizer, and you'll see the point of that
guideline. In fact, an extreme view of ascii art would consider it to be
merely abuse of a coincidence, which makes some characters line up on
some fonts. "Based on unsupported and unrealiable assumptions."

The PRE-element, which has been around since the first versions of HTML,
is so useful that it is usually considered a "good thing". Still, it is
a layout element. Another part of the same document discourages the use
of PRE for tables. The same point applies here. If you use PRE to create
for example multicolumn layout, a speech synthetizer or a search engine
is just going to ram the columns together.

Of course, this isn't the end or the content-layout dilemma. Unicode,
as well as plain old ASCII, contains a lot of characters that express
layout. Intrinsic directionality is obviously a layout thing, yet quite
necessary for mixing, say, latin and hebrew text. Soft hyphens are
layout codes - there's even a (netscape proprietary) HTML tag to do
their funtion, <wbr>.

Even just capitalization is a conflict, brought to surface by the CSS
attribute "text-transform: uppercase". (or something like that - I
don't have a CSS reference around) So is strictly speaking punctuation
as well. The HTML 4.0 standard draws the line, quite wisely IMHO, at
the level of <Q>, which may or may not add quotation marks. if the line
were drawn at grammar level, we'd be writing a lot differently.

<sentence>this is how it would look like, if punctuation and
capitalization were handled at tag level</sentence>
<sentence type=question>would you prefer this</sentence><sentence>i
wouldn't</sentence>

  Just remember, it's only a recommendation. No-one is saying ascii-art
  should not be used. Just don't put it in places were it might reduce
  accessibility. Figletized titles migth seem like a fancy idea, but
  even if you never get blind visitors, no indexing 'bot is going to
  make head or tail of some mess of /\|()[]{}.

--
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_\__/ |__.'\._______,--;_'_`-.___,.______,/_,_`.__,-.__'__,/`-._,_| \____
 ,_f_)\. Ilmari Karonen  ilt...@sci.fi  http://www.sci.fi/~iltzu/  /(_|_,.