RE: [WSG] Aural Property in CSS2???
There's lots of cool stuff in CSS 2, but the spec itself is broken, I can't remember if it ever even became a W3C recomendation or not. CSS 2.1 is in its final stages now and its specifically designed to fix the problems in the CSS 2 spec. In light of this - I don't think any browsers have actually made any sort of real effort to completely support CSS 2 yet. So in short - forget CSS 2 - it died before it ever got off the ground. CSS 2.1 is where its at but assuming that it becomes a recommendation sometime in the next few months - I doubt you will see any browser fully support it within the next 12 months and you are looking at a number of years before you see broad based support. Another interesting point is that (AFAIK) screen readers have some of the worst CSS support out of any of the browsers barring lynx (which doesn't support CSS at all). I think most of the aural stuff in CSS is aimed a screen readers and other audio agents (like voicemail services) not your common visual browsers. On a kind of side topic there was a really interesting blog post a while back where a guy had a chat to the IE dev teams and managed get them to take feature requests via his blog. The requests are listed at: http://scoblecomments.scripting.com/comments?u=1011p=6183link=http%3A%2F%2 Fradio.weblogs.com%2F0001011%2F2004%2F01%2F14.html%23a6183. Well worth a read. Mostly people asked for tabbed browsing, PNG support and CSS 2 support. The most interesting comment in there is one from Tantek Celik. When Tantek talks about CSS - its best to really listen very closely because he is at the center of it all - he was formally in charge of CSS support in the IE/Mac team and is now part of the CSS working group at the W3C. Do a search for tantek read his comment - there is lots of interesting stuff in there. Cheers Mark -- Mark Stanton Technical Director Gruden Pty Ltd Tel: 9956 6388 Mob: 0410 458 201 Fax: 9956 8433 http://www.gruden.com * The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ *
RE: [WSG] Aural Property in CSS2???
still its not CSS2 then is it??? Yes it is. if its not controlled by the browser but rather external software.. A screen reader is a browser in a sense, actually user agent is more acurracte I guess, but the point is they do read web pages. i was looking for the CSS code to play a WAV file anyone? Barking up the wrong tree mate - you're going to need an external player for that. I'd suggest Flash as the best option. 2 points: + Do you really need sound? IMHO decorative sound like background music on web pages sucks. Remember those pages in the late ninties with midi loops? cringe/ + If you really need sound - don't have it play automatically. Make the user click a play button or something. (Just a personal opinion). Cheers Mark -- Mark Stanton Technical Director Gruden Pty Ltd Tel: 9956 6388 Mob: 0410 458 201 Fax: 9956 8433 http://www.gruden.com * The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ *
RE: [WSG] Aural Property in CSS2???
I'm not a not huge fan of these CSS2 properties. What they are trying to achieve is important, but how they achieve it is a mess at best. When voiceXML first started appearing people asked why another language? There is no getting away from the fact that html was designed for visual presentation not audible presentation. Screen readers are doing a pretty good job considering how much of a wadge it really is. Markups like voiceXML are required to really describe content in a suitable way for audible presentation / interaction and many VoiceXML parameter values follow the conventions used in CSS. http://www.voicexml.org/specs/multimodal/x+v/11/examples/ Still a long way to go... Regards Chris Blown Another interesting point is that (AFAIK) screen readers have some of the worst CSS support out of any of the browsers barring lynx (which doesn't support CSS at all). I think most of the aural stuff in CSS is aimed a screen readers and other audio agents (like voicemail services) not your common visual browsers. * The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ *
