Finding Real Use Cases for Longdesc

Hi,
   I just reviewed the wiki page for the longdesc attribute [1] and was 
somewhat surprised to see that there weren't really any use cases 
provided.  Rather, it was a list of beneficiaries who would supposedly 
benefit from it being used in some unspecified cases.  So I moved those 
to a section called Beneficiaries and added 3 real use cases in their 
place.  It would really help others could be found and added.

In that page, it is claimed:
> LONGDESC is indispensable for anyone attempting to perform serious 
> academic work via the web. Increasingly, colleges and universities 
> are incorporating online ciriccula into all aspects of learning -- on 
> campus, off-campus, long-distance, etc. In many jurisdictions, this 
> means ensuring equal access to all course content

If that's true, it would be great to find some real examples of such 
academic work and document those as use cases.  It could hardly be 
called "indispensable" if academic work isn't really using it.

This is a sample of pages [2] found that use the longdesc attribute.  I 
randomly selected and looked at a sample of about a dozen of them so 
far, yet unfortunately haven't found any examples of legitimate use. 
Note that I'm not looking at statistics, just trying to find examples 
that show longdesc being used *legitimately* and *usefully*.  If anyone 
finds any that are legitimate (either from this list or elsewhere), 
please document them as use cases in the wiki.

[1] http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/LongdescRetention
[2] http://junkyard.damowmow.com/292

-- 
Lachlan Hunt
http://lachy.id.au/

Received on Thursday, 23 August 2007 08:26:11 UTC