Re: TIDY - Objects to euro symbol (?) & very pedestrian about ALT for gifs

On 29 Apr 2000, at 15:49, WCD wrote:

> It seems pedestrian in the extreme that such invisible graphic images
> should be required to have an alt="something" attribute. 

I'm not sure I understand.  _Does_ Tidy require this?  Running Tidy against 
this line:

  <img src="fred.gif">

in an HTML file results in the same line in the tidied output.  Or by 
"require," are you objecting to the warning that Tidy generates?


On 29 Apr 2000, at 22:20, html-tidy@war-of-the-worlds.o wrote:

> Tidy could possibly use a heuristic that keeps track of img srcs and
> dimensions and note images where the same image is given, say, 3 or more
> different sizes, and presuming they are resized transparent GIF
> references and provide them with alt="" attributes automatically.  [...] 
> Anyone like this idea? 

Hmmm...if the first poster is objecting to the warnings, then an option to 
suppress the warnings would be more appropriate (and a lot easier :-), I 
would think.

While I completely understand the need for ALT attributes on images, I 
never quite understood the rationale for having the "alt-text" option in 
Tidy.  To be useful, surely the alternate text has to be relevant to the 
image, which the "alt-text" option does not provide.  Far more 
understandable to me is the warning that Tidy generates to alert the author 
that such attributes are missing.

However, if the author does not want to view the warnings, then simply 
suppressing them seems a far better approach than adding meaningless ALT 
attribute values.

(The October 1999 release notes say, "A number of people have asked for a 
config option to set the alt attribute for images when missing."  I'm not 
advocating the removal of this option, even if I don't appreciate it's 
value.  :-)  I am advocating a different method of suppressing 
accessibility warnings other than adding meaningless text.)

                                      -- Dave

Received on Monday, 1 May 2000 19:47:26 UTC