On Jul 12, 2006, at 17:57, Robin Lionheart wrote:
Henri Sivonen wrote:
And then what? Why is it useful that a computer knows that a
string on a Web page is a human name?
Off the top of my head, a couple possible benefits of tagging
proper names:
* smarter search engines
(<name>Bill Gates</name> is not the words "bill" and "gates".
Could be beneficial to newspaper sites.)
For the search engines internal to news sites this could be
implemented using a private extension if it was deemed worth the
trouble.
As for general search engines, this isn't really a problem. If I
Google for "bill gates", I get results about Bill Gates--not about
invoice stages or something similarly contrived. And I am pretty sure
that if Google or a competitor wanted to do something smart with
names on Web pages, they'd be better off seeding a guessing machine
with phone book data than by insisting that everyone change their
markup.
* speech synthesis
(Surely there's a good reason CSS3 Speech has "interpret-as:
name" and VoiceXML has interpret-as="name")
"The interpret-as property has been temporarily dropped until the
Voice Browser working group has further progressed work on the SSML
<say-as> element."
...says the latest CCS3 Speech WD.
I don't see interpret-as="name" in VoiceXML 2.0 or 2.1.
* spell checking
(Usable by Web page editing software)
Spell checkers work just fine without knowing what words are names.
--
Henri Sivonen
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
