Christian Montoya wrote: > If you heard what pipe separators sound like in a screen reader, you > wouldn't think they were semantic. Just because they have a long > history doesn't make them machine-readable.
Well, I have heard what they sound like when Opera reads them out, which is no biggie. And I wasn't implying that semantic = machine-readable. Patrick H. Lauke wrote: > Asterisks have a long history of being used to denote required form > fields...but that doesn't make them semantic either. Just > like the pipe > separators, it's a case of a *visual* convention from the > print world. > They do not have meaning on their own, but their meaning has been > inferred. The same inference happens when we used to use <font > size="+3"> instead of a proper <h1> or whatever to denote a heading... Well, if it's a convention, then it *has* meaning. The question is then whether the meaning is clear enough, to a wide enough selection of the audience. With HTML, we can also ask if there is a 'correct' way to mark-up the meaning. But incorrect mark-up != un-semantic in the broader sense, only that the semantics of the contents do not match the semantics of the mark-up. For asterixes, the meaning is the same as a footnote: "see below for clarification". It's a pre-web in-page hyperlink. On a web page you can make the link even more explicit by adding an href to the footer text, but it's not necessary because everyone already *knows* what it means. It is just as semantic as writing 'required' next to a label (Required what?). The meaning is the same. As for lists, the pipe separated menu list is perfectly clear to most people. What is missing is a clean way to mark it up with HTML. You could use an unordered list, styled inline, but that is overkill in many cases, and not an useable if you want the list to be inline when styles are missing or turned off. Geoff. ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
