Re: longdesc using #id

Chair hat off.

I concur with chaals on this.

Regards
Steve

On 23 Nov 2012, at 14:21, "Charles McCathie Nevile" <chaals@yandex-team.ru> wrote:

> (chair hat off)
> 
> Hi,
> 
> there has been some discussion about longdescs whose URL is a relative reference to somewhere in the page. And there have been implementation reports that some screen reader / browser combinations don't handle this well.
> 
> I think that is a bug in the relevant software (maybe screenreader, maybe the underlying browser). There is a demo of longdesc that Patrick Lauke wrote to go with his Firefox extension, last updated in 2008, which uses internal page links, and the extension as well as the browser-native implementations of iCab and Opera all handle the case of an internal reference just as they would an external one.
> 
> In the original HTML specification of longdesc, the value of the attribute is given as URI, and that can be an internal or an absolute link (the same as the href attribute for a link). I don't know of any evidence that longdesc was intended to only work on external pages, despite some implementations failing if you don't do that.
> 
> During the seemingly endless discussions of ISSUE-30 in the HTML WG, one argument raised against longdesc was that it forced the description to be on a separate page. This assertion is not backed up by the spec, but by some implementations.
> 
> It seems to me that there are valid use cases for having the description on the same page as an image, and pointing to it. So I think the HTML 4 spec was right, and we should re-affirm that, and file bugs against the software that doesn't implement it properly. (I have already done this for the Yandex browser...)
> 
> cheers
> 
> Chaals
> 
> -- 
> Charles McCathie Nevile - Consultant (web standards) CTO Office, Yandex
>      chaals@yandex-team.ru         Find more at http://yandex.com
>

Received on Friday, 23 November 2012 11:37:57 UTC