Hi Paul - I think you'r completely mis-interpreting what I'm saying....
Also your example of a "large, quadrapedal, grazing ungulate" would, I
think, be almost universally deonounced as the exact opposite of the way a
DL should be used.
MOST people would express this as:
<dt>Cow</dt>
<dt>Dear</dt>
<dt>Horse</dt>
<dd>large, quadrapedal, grazing ungulate</dd>
Also your example of the webmaster using images for product names is all
well and good, but this webmaster is obviously NOT working with
standards/semantics in mind. That's a pretty flawed analogy...
Further, when you pull out the example of the dog urinating on a specific
nationalisty's flagpole.
Well this is a perfect example of why an image is not necessarily the best
thing to go in the DT.
As you state the image can mean any number of things. If we're trying to
represent one concept - 'dog' - then even though there is a dog in this
image, the image itself does not wholy and exclusively represent 'dog'. For
the DT / DD set to demonstrate 'dog'ness, putting this photo in the DT would
be absolutely useless.
In terms of semoitics and web accessibility, the "image of a Golden
Retriever catching a frisbee" is a great summation of most images' inability
to wholly express one concept. To use this image in a DT would involve DDs
with content like:
Photographer James Matheson
Copyright 2005
Golden Retriever
Frisbee
Sports
Park
Play
Activity
Disc
Dogs
Companionship
Sorry, but does this sound like the type of list that would accompany an
image in an IMAGE GALLERY? Doesn't this validate the point I made at the
very beginning of this discussion?
R
----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Novitski" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, April 06, 2006 5:15 AM
Subject: Re: [WSG] Definition List for Products/Items with Image
At 12:00 AM 4/5/2006, Richard Czeiger wrote:
After all, SOMETHING has to go in the <dt> and it makes sense to make it
the one thing that is MOST appropriate.
Taking your logic to the nth degree you might as well put everything in a
<dt>.
Not really -- if everything's in DTs there's no point in using the DL in
the first place; you might as well use an unordered list. As you know,
the DL has at least these advantages:
1) its semantic structure is that of a list of item/description pairs
which matches up well with many of the lists we present;
2) it's an HTML list with two types of child element, making it easy to
style them differently without using classes. Unlike OL and UL, each DL
list item can consist of multiple DT and DD tags, increasing the markup &
styling possibilities.
When you're marking up a literal dictionary you usually know which is the
term and which is the definition: the term is usually the short one, is
usually listed alphabetically, and usually comes first; the definition is
usually longer, is usually not alphabetical, and comes second. Or the
term is in vocabulary A and the definition is in vocabulary B. The
definition is often thought of as describing the term, but really they
describe one another, collaborating in a common web of meaning. Which is
the DT and which is the DD depends on the author's purpose for the list
and their perspective on its content.
With other types of collection that stray farther from the "dictionary"
model, it's my assertion that which term goes in the DT and which in the
DD can be even more arbitrary. If you're marking up a collection of items
in which no one element is definitively The Term but instead in which
several items collaborate to form a single gestalt, then yes, you could
put more than one item in DT and/or more than one item in DD. (Multiple
DTs are common even in literal dictionary lists, as illustrated in the W3C
spec.)
Even a "description" can be a DT:
DT a large, quadrapedal, grazing ungulate
DD cow
DD deer
DD horse
If you'll grant me that flexibility, then I'll conclude that it's not
incorrect to freely choose the one item for the DT that will make styling
the list a breeze:
image title
description
price
Doesn't the title describe the photo as much as the photo describes the
title?
True: A photograph isn't a 'definition' but it's also not the primary
identifer for most scenarios outside a Photo Gallery. The reason I know
this is because if you pointed me to a URL and I first asked what I'd see
there, you'd tell me "its a Mbira Dzavadzimu", you might even say "its a
photo of a Mbira Dzavadzimu" if it was an especially spiffy photo but you
wouldn't just say "a photo" which is exactly what <img /> is interpreted
as. It's technically correct but not especially helpful. Textual data, in
this case and most others, seems to be the most appropriate way of
initially identifying an object/concept, at leats in the
telecommunciations medium.
No, I wouldn't likely say "a photo" any more than I would say "a
headline." An IMG tag by itself doesn't convey much meaning, but neither
does H1 or P. It's the content of those tags that conveys the most useful
meaning to us.
What I hear you saying is that the crucial difference between text and
image in this context is that text can be encoded in a defined character
set and is therefore parsable but images are transmitted as bit-streams
without a similarly simplistic symbolic encoding and are therefore
unparsable. I can imagine this argument for machines --
although image-search engines are going to blow that one out of the water
in the next few years -- but more to the point when sighted humans look at
a page they read, comprehend, and remember the meaning, content, and
context of both the images and the text. If I'm bookmarking pages about
mbira I'll grab the ones with photos and drawings and scans of musical
transcriptions as well as the ones with plain text.
According to your argument (I think), if I scan in text or produce it in
Photoshop, then the meaning of that text is lost and it no longer
qualifies as something that can go in a DT, unless the DL is, say, a
gallery of font samples.
Imagine browsing through a catalog in which the webmaster has used
Photoshop to render the product names as images of text but failed to
provide alt attributes: you're still reading the text if you're able, it's
just not ASCII-encoded. Do the product names no longer go in the DT
because of the method used to render the text? But then if you add alt
attributes they can go back in the DT? Hmm.
I feel that an image can be a term to be defined even when it's a photo or
drawing of a product in a catalog. Imagine browsing through a clothing
catalog: you see an outfit that catches your eye, then you read the item's
name and description. The text defines and describes the image. Imagine
you're looking through a web developer's portfolio: you see a thumbnail of
a website that looks interesting so you read the blurb. Imagine you're
looking through any list whatsoever that includes images and text: you see
an image that looks interesting and you read the text that describes it.
Now if you're text-searching those same listings, you'll locate items by
their titles or blurbs or alt-text; in that case you may already know the
name of something and the image will act in a supportive role to help
describe the item. It's the same list, though, and I doubt many people
would propose that we swap DTs & DDs dynamically based on our assumptions
about how the visitor is using it in the moment.
I'm curious: why are you applying different standards of
meaning-interpretation to images and to text? If you regard images as
anonymous without regard to their pictorial or alt-attribute content, then
wouldn't it follow that you'd see <dt>Mbira Dzavadzimu</dt> as an
anonymous text block without regard for its meaning as well? Of course
you wouldn't (even though you may not know what "dzavadzimu" means or even
if it means anything at all). We attribute meaning to the symbols we use.
As you know, words in English are spelled with letters each of which is
derived from a picture of a concrete object, you know, like alpha/aleph
started out as an ox's head. Text is made up of strings of these
letter-pictures that have, over time, been assigned new meanings. But
it's not that different with what we call images. A photo of a dog may
seem like just a photo of a dog, but if a particular breed of dog is
urinating at the base of a particular national flag then a whole flock of
additional meanings take flight. A bear in a cartoon can say "Russia." A
T-shirt that says "bum" across the chest can mean very different things
depending on what font it's in. The Firefox logo brings up associations
of foxes even though the software itself has nothing to do with the
critters. The Internet Explorer logo includes a big blue e. When is an
"image" a "word" and when is "text" an "image"? Certainly the symbologies
are different, but is the type of information conveyed so categorizable
and so categorically different that it can never qualify as a definable
term except in an art or photo gallery?
How about a non-verbal dictionary of international symbols:
DT symbol for no smoking
DD picture of a man smoking
DD picture of a custodian scolding the man and pointing to the symbol
DD picture of the man putting out the cigarette
DT symbol for men's toilet
DD picture of a man drinking
DD picture of the man walking through a doorway marked with the symbol
DD picture of the man urinating
But maybe you're not talking about meaning theory but instead about web
accessibility. In five or ten years when Jaws can read a page of text
including "image of a Golden Retriever catching a frisbee," will your
argument about images and text necessarily differ?
Warm regards,
Paul
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