Re: [office] XHTML 2 and ODF?

[Bruce D'Arcus <bruce.darcus@OpenDocument.us>]

Hi Richard,

On Mar 21, 2006, at 2:55 PM, Richard Schwerdtfeger wrote:

> I am on the HTML working group developing XHTML2 and the ODF 
> accessibility subteam.

Oh good!

> I was one of the engineers that developed the role attribute additon. 
> It is not clear we need that at this time. Neither the XHTML 2 or the 
> Dynamic Web Accessibility Specifications are at recommendation phase 
> so we just can't pull in the features through namespaces. For the 
> greatest value I believe the role value would be linked to a taxonomy 
> covering drawings/diagrams. ... but we may find value for it in this 
> or a later release of ODF.

What was interesting to me about "role" was not so much its specifics 
(I"m really not sure whether we could use it), so much as that its 
design reflects consideration of both accessibility and semantic web 
integration, which is now the subject of two of our subcommittees.

Those of working on metadata had realized that we'll need one or more 
attributes that link content or styles to metadata descriptions, so 
hence my interest. But the attributes that are a part of RDF/A are 
probably closer to what we'd need.

Aside: there's another thing that I really like about XHTML 2.0, which 
is that it has real sectional structures and smarter paragraph 
structures (they can contain lists and other blocks). I realize this is 
a fairly radical break with the existing flat structure of XHTML 1.0 
and ODF, but it does bring with it a variety of benefits, including 
enhancing accessibility (mentioned in the presentation by Pemberton). 
Maybe something worth thinking about for ODF 2.0.

> Is Notes something the TC was going to add to ODF and if so when?

ODF already has what I was asking for, which is some way to indicate 
what in print-oriented formats like ODF are rendered as footnotes or 
endnotes.

Bruce