Re: LYNX-DEV Internal MIME types

[Al Gilman]

  From: Klaus Weide <address@hidden>
  
  How does [relaxing the parse data structure beyond being a
tree] further the goals of the Web *Access* Initiative?
  
Orthogonalizing different dimensions of the content is moving in
the right direction, in my view, because of my assumptions about
the form of the solution to the access problem.

In technical drawing, the world model contains three degrees of
freedom, but the capabilities of the presentation frame only deal
with two.  So two presentation frames are required.  Of the
front, top, and side views, you get sufficient information from
any two.  This means that you are presenting 4 dimensions to know
3.

In 3D graphics, you save the content in 3D and derive the 2D
projection on the fly.

I am hypothesizing that that is how one will support a sufficient
variety of user interface modalities.  Not that there is another
auxiliary datatype for each disability, but that the storage form
is a bit more analytical and that all views including the
"normal" view are generated from N out of M of the stored
elements.

This way there could be a small surplus of data dimensions over
information dimensions, and that the adapted viewframe for
audio+keyboard, audio+12-key-pad, HDTV + mouse only, etc. will be
a derived view on an underlying semantic object model.  It would
be good if a lot of the styling of different dimensions were
independent, and only the core topology of the information is
required in all presentations.  This is like ensuring that there
is an ASCII representation underlying the page-counter display
(unlike now).

The basic idea is that we should be thinking in N dimensions to
solve the problem of access for various sensory and motor
disabilities and so we might as well get used to it.  A tree only
offers something like 1.5 dimensions.  Not enough.

--
Al

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