WCAG 2.0 references to and definitions of Unicode and text

Notes for writing a proposal for Issue 673 - We are working with Internationalization (I18N) on including references and improved wording related to the WCAG 2.0 definitions for "text" and "character encoding".

Proposals

How is "text" used in the 30 July 2004 WCAG 2.0 Working Draft?

Uses of non-text content

Notes from previous discussions

From Martin

Characters are the result of some input operation (which could be typing on a keyboard, using a mouse to select a character in a point-and-click fashion from a pannel, using voice input,...). I think what you want to say is that operations (which includes character input, but also other things such as navigation) can be achieved with means other than pointing devices.

As an example, pressing the TAB key inserts a TAB control character (	 in XML notation) into the text in the context e.g. of text input in a plain text editor. It definitely causes other actions (e.g. jumping to the next link or form in a browser,...) in other contexts. In these cases, this has nothing to do with the TAB character, only with the TAB key on the keyboard. Some other keys on a keyboard don't have a corresponding character at all, and some have a character in Unicode solely for the purpose of printing that symbol in manuals.

From Richard

My guess is that the intent was to say something along the lines of "represented in the Unicode *character set*". Unicode/ISO 10646 is the document character set for HTML 4.0 and XML, meaning that although any encoding can be used, characters used must be found in Unicode to fit the reference processing model. (See http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-doc-charset.html )

From Gregg with Richard and Martin at lunch on 2 March)

Inside of PDF they may use a different code -- or some docs may be in compressed form that is decompressed in player -- but not change into Unicode until a 'copy' or export operation is done on the text.

Other references


$Date: 2004/09/08 23:48:49 $ Wendy Chisholm