Hi David,
Well, you did it --ask me for an explanation-- so here goes:
The idea of style sheets is to enable separation and presentation of document
content. So an HTML document continues to have structural markup
with how things get shown on the screen e.g. "Section headers are Red"
specified in a stylesheet.
The W3C consortium has been working for almost a year on a notion of cascaded
style sheets that will allow both authors and readers to customize the
presentation without explicitly saying things like
<h1 color="1FFF2F" > Introduction in some unknown color</h1>
(you see the above all over the WWW right now.)
The CSS as it existed until about a month ago only defined visual presentation
styles such as font size, color etc etc.
About a month ago I implemented a first-cut at speech stylesheets and wrote up
a draft specification which I then submitted to the W3C --that is what you
read about in the announcement.
So what does this get us:
1) An author (and more importantly the reader) can specify how a document
should be spoken.
2) Rather than relying exclusively on how something "looks" on the screen you
will be able to get pleasant aural output.
3) Most importantly, it focuses the WWW community's attention on speech access
to the WWW.
In the past, we as blind users have relied on access technology playing
catchup --which is part of the reason why what we get to use today is so
broken.
I'm hoping that in the next go-around, things will pan out differently where
access technology evolves hand-in-hand with mainstream interfaces.
>From this perspective, it was *crucial*
to get a speech stylesheet defined *at the same time* as a visual style sheet
mechanism.
--Best Regards, ____________________________________________________________________________ --raman
Adobe Systems Tel: 1 (415) 962 3945 (B-1 115) Advanced Technology Group Fax: 1 (415) 962 6063 1585 Charleston Road Email: raman@adobe.com Mountain View, CA 94039 -7900 raman@cs.cornell.edu http://www-atg/People/Raman.html (Internal To Adobe) http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Info/People/raman/raman.html (Cornell)
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are my own and in no way should be taken as representative of my employer, Adobe Systems Inc. ____________________________________________________________________________
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