Re: 48-Hour Consensus Call: InstateLongdesc CP Update

Hi all,

As part of a survey of the top 10,000 web sites home pages carried out
back in April [1] I grepped the instances of longdesc [2]
this is what I found:

1938 matches in 86 files.

You can review the data and draw your own conclusions.


[1] http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2012/04/html-data-for-the-masses-data-dump/
[2] http://www.html5accessibility.com/HTML5data/dump/longdesc.html


regards
SteveF

On 18 September 2012 22:34, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com> wrote:
>
> On Sep 18, 2012, at 2:16 PM, John Foliot <john@foliot.ca> wrote:
>
>> Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>>>
>>> In addition to issues with these specific suggestions, keep in mind
>>> that a previously raised concern with longdesc is that the corpus of
>>> available longdesc content in the wild appears to have very high level
>>> of bad content.
>>
>> I encourage you or others to provide specific proof of that assertion.
>>
>> On one hand, we have professional content producers that are creating
>> @longdesc content today (Pearson Publishing and the  Government of Canada to
>> name 2), who, if nothing else, are probably quite good at document
>> management practices.
>> (http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-a11y/2012Sep/0210.html)
>>
>> On the other hand, we have a 5-year old blog post from Mark Pilgrim
>> (http://blog.whatwg.org/the-longdesc-lottery) that alludes to statistics
>> that Ian Hickson accrued, but was unwilling to publicly share.
>>
>> Do you have any other "proof" of this assertion? Have you or anyone else
>> "surveyed" the corpus recently to see if there have been any changes to this
>> assertion over the past 5 years? (Note: I have not, but given that serious
>> content publishers are now using this attribute routinely in their work, I
>> can only surmise it has improved significantly - but feel free to dispute
>> that claim with proof to the contrary.)
>
> I'm just mentioning the point of concern that was raised. I am not interested in debating its validity.
>
> I will note that, if you want to persuade browser vendors to implement something, claiming that the evidence provided is not "proof" is unlikely to be a very compelling argument. Providing actual evidence to the contrary may be more compelling.
>
> The rest of your message seems to be more about whether longdesc should be "retained" in the spec in the sense of a conformance requirement that has no engineering impact. I don't have any substantive comments on that question. But I do note that it seems to be back in the mode of "mandate something that browsers won't implement".
>
> Regards,
> Maciej
>
>

Received on Tuesday, 18 September 2012 21:54:47 UTC