Re: Moving longdesc forward: Recap, updates, consensus

Tantek Çelik, Sat, 7 May 2011 09:51:57 -0700:

> On Fri, May 6, 2011 at 18:36, John Foliot <jfoliot@stanford.edu> wrote:
>> Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis wrote:
>>> 
>>> Here's Tantek's objection from the poll:
>>> 
>>> "[@longdesc] is one of the worst forms of invisible metadata
>>>  or "dark data" which are known to rot and become inaccurate
>>>  over time (see: meta keywords, RDF in comments, sidefiles, etc.)."
>>
>> Links rot; this is a known problem.
> 
> To be clear - the data/content rot I refer to is *not* the link rot 
problem. 

That might be what you had in mind in your poll comment - however 
w.r.t. your longdesc lottery article ...

  [...]

> In the case of "longdesc" - the content rot scenario is that a web
> author changes the image (src) to point to something else, but forgets
> to update the longdesc to point to a new description  because it is
> hidden metadata and isn't apparent as being "wrong" when the author
> refreshes the page in their browser to check it.

... when you prepared your "longdesc lottery" article, did you came 
across any longdesc links where it was obvious that the @longdesc 
pointed to an image description, but where the image description did 
not matter anymore because the img's @src had been updated and now was 
pointing to another image?

> Was there already a debate somewhere between longdesc="" vs. 
> rel="longdesc" ?

If you look at the change proposal Laura has been authoring, then yes, 
the use of anchor elements is discussed - as are many other 
alternatives to @longdesc.
-- 
Leif H Silli

Received on Saturday, 7 May 2011 18:17:04 UTC