Patrick H. Lauke wrote:
[snip] consider the scenario of a screenreader user who skips from paragraph to paragraph, and ends up on the second paragraph of this
<p><cite>Harry S. Truman</cite> said, <q lang="en-us">The buck stops here.</q></p> ... <p>He then also said <q>something else entirely</q>.</p>
Now, assuming that the screenreader flags up that "something else entirely" is actually a quote, it still can't (programmatically) determine what source it's being cited from.
I understand where you are coming from but I believe it is a bad example. To me, the above would look like:
Harry S Truman said, "the buck stops here."
He then also said, "something else entirely."
This is a perfectly natural English language grammar. Of course writing for web isn't the same as print but sometimes things do pass across. If someone is skipping paragraph to paragraph they are likely to lose a little plot. I do like the way XHTML 2 is going with the quoting and citing.
The user will, if interested, start reading around the <q> element, but still not find out who the quote is from, and will have to - in the worst case - read the entire document top to bottom until stumbling across the <cite>.
See above. I'll reiterate that sometimes meta-information can sometimes invalidate good written grammar. In certain contexts, all people should read entire documents. If I encounter a personal pronoun within a text, I have to occasionally read back a few lines. Of course this is made even more difficult by the actual citation. Harry Truman is the source of the quote above, whereas it is likely to be a html or other document in most situations. I am not a user of a screen reader so would welcome any input on how they handle reading section by section. Do they have a function which will take them back a few sentences? I believe that a document design needs to stay focussed on the fact that some elements of a document shouldn't be hidden behind-the-scenes whilst some should (eg. the summary attribute now promoted to an element in the last XHTML 2.0 draft I read). I should stop now because this is the sort of thing to be taken to the XHTML 2 WG list.
Admittedly, you may not encounter this type of scenario often, and it's maybe an extreme case I'm talking about, but still...something that just nags at me ;)
I am also nagged by the lack of ability that UAs give for handling the cite attribute in blockquote and q elements. There are ways of presenting the information but it is limited to non-ie browsers in most cases. It's a hard decision because, I don't aim to alienate my readers too much, but I do want the freedom to present attractive information to browsers which can handle it.
-- Paul Connolley SQL/Systems Programmer Egocentric - http://egocentric.co.uk
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