[whatwg] The m element

[Martin Atkins]

James Graham wrote:
> Leons Petrazickis wrote:
>> They are marking the search terms with a highlighter. In an aural
>> browser, would these terms be read differently? Perhaps. Does this
>> transfer to mobile browsers? Very definitely.
> 
> How would an auraul browser treak these terms differently? I can perhaps 
> imagine some sort of generated content e.g. the foo <m>bar</m> would be 
> read "the foo `begin mark` bar `end mark`" but it's not entirely 
> convincing.
> 
[snip]
 >
> what useful features could a general purpose UA implement if 
> this semantic information is made avaliable to it?
> 

The first thing I tend to do when I load up a Google Cache result is do 
an inline find for one of my search keywords or manually scan the page 
for the yellow text. Some keyboard shortcuts or on-screen buttons for 
skipping back and forth between highlights would be nice.

I can't think of any use-cases for highlighting where this navigation 
aid *wouldn't* be useful. After all, the purpose of highlighting is to 
help your eyes locate important information more quickly; when you 
express it with markup, it can help your browser to help your eyes 
locate important information more quickly in a document that doesn't all 
fit on-screen at once.

As for aural browsers, they too can implement the above navigation aid, 
but allow the user to have the surrounding context read as well so that 
it actually makes some sense, thus avoiding reading the entire document 
just to locate the highlighted text.