Re: aural markup for sizes

JRS: In article <tHzRoEPYirsEFw+4@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, dated Mon, 10
Jul 2006 21:29:12 remote, seen in news:uk.net.web.authoring, Andy
Mabbett <usenet200309@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> posted :
In message <dQW74zEAhosEFwor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Dr John Stockton
<jrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes
I have just run the following markup through Opera's voice browser:

15x12cm

That's a meaningless alphanumeric string, and should be pronounced as
such.

No; in the context of the page concerned:

http://www.westmidlandbirdclub.com/biblio/biblo2.htm

it is a way of representing - and should be pronounced as- "fifteen by
twelve centimetres"; the size of a book.

That's the intention, evidently; but 15x12cm is not the right way to
represent that intention, and it should not be necessary for a voice
browser to have to pronounce it as a human would. Humans understand
context better than browsers do.

You should IMHO use &times;, and a space before cm.


I see two possible problems with the &sup2; &sup3; approach, which one
of your articles here implies that you might use :

(A) When deployed at standard size, among text of standard size, the
characters given by &supN; may well be more or less illegible : m² m³ :
and therefore fall foul of disability principles and legislation
(unless, I suppose, presented only to blind users). <sup> gives larger
characters (for me, almost too large). But YMMV.

(B) They may be (almost?) the only characters of that nature generally
available; and it will be unreasonable to use them in wider contexts
needing higher, negative, non-integer, or non-numeric subscripts or
superscripts. <sup> & <sub> accept any characters AFAICS.




Should <sup>/<sub> nest? In A<sup>B<sub>C</sub></sup>, should C
subscript B (for maths), or should it be a belated subscript of A (for
chemists, though they should use A<sup>B</sup><sub>C</sub>)?

--
© John Stockton, Surrey, UK. ?@merlyn.demon.co.uk Turnpike v4.00 IE 4 ©
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