Re: [user-assistance-discuss] Thoughts on Graphical Callouts

[Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>]

/ "Paul Prescod" <paul.prescod@xmetal.com> was heard to say:
|> For what it's worth, DocBook "areaset" markup is designed to 
|> support floating letters or numbers. The HTML stylesheets 
|> generate a client side imagemap for the callout marks. 
|
| A few questions:
|
| 1. Do the stylesheets actually generate any kind of marks or do you
| presume that the marks are in the underlying graphic?

At the moment, I assume the marks are in the graphic. (For marks on
program listings and other text content, they're inserted.)

I think I could add the marks with CSS, but I haven't had a chance to
verify that yet. I do plan to try...eventually.

| 2. Do you do anything with callouts in print or other output formats?

Authors are free to refer to callouts anywhere they wish, but there is
an explicit calloutlist element intended to hold the descriptions of
each callout area. A very sophisticated formatting system could,
conceivably, use this to make the box-and-arrow views, though as I
said, I don't know of any system that's capable of that.

| 3. Can you comment on any non-obvious requirements that have been
| expressed over the years which were incorporated into the curent design?

The current design hasn't evolved very much in many years. The only
recent change was the ability for one area to inherit it's linking
attributes from the areaset that contains it. That allows you to have
a fairly complex imagemap without having to copy the link attributes
over and over again.

See, for example, the Example at the bottom of
http://docbook.org/tdg5/en/html/imageobjectco.html

| 4. Have users expressed requirements that you never got around to
| incorporating?

No, but it's a rare area in DocBook were our markup was in advance of
implementation experience. For a long time, there were no widely
available systems that could do anything practical with it :-(

Now that it's more feasible to use, we may get more feature requests :-)

| 5. Have you considered any kind of "alt text" for areas? For example,
| one could imagine that callouts on a map might be replaced with textual
| descriptions of addresses. Of course it is hard to imagine a textual
| description of a toolbar button, but perhaps alternative text could
| describe how to invoke the action through the keyboard.

We just changed "area" elements to allow "alt" elements inside them
for this purpose. I haven't, however, done anything with the alts yet
in the stylesheets.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh
XML Standards Architect
Sun Microsystems, Inc.

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