Re: handling fallback content for still images

On Jul 5, 2007, at 4:08 PM, scott lewis wrote:

>
> On 4 Jul 2007, at 1853, Robert Burns wrote:
>
>> I had another thought about a a long-term solution (and basically  
>> this is about long-term solutions) anyway.. Is it possible that,  
>> by moving to an xml serialization, this problem will be solved? In  
>> other words, can we just do <img src="myimage' >fallback</img>  
>> whenever HTML5 content is served as XML. To me this should work  
>> (at least as a complement to the other solutions).
>
> Forgive me if this point has already been covered -- I may have  
> overlooked it in the discussion.
>
> HTML5 is a language with two serializations (I'll call them): HTML/ 
> xml and HTML5/html. These are both representations of the same  
> document. Both serializations of a document must parse identically,  
> otherwise they aren't serializations of the same language. There is  
> a simple test to ensure that: take a document in one serialization,  
> parse it, generate the other serialization from it, then parse the  
> other serialization and require the parsed documents are identical.
>
> With this method of <img> fallback, **the fallback content must be  
> discarded** when the document is serialized as HTML5/html. Thus, my  
> simple test would fail.
>
> Converting an HTML5 document from one serialization to the other is  
> a perfectly legal operation. I feel strongly that it is a bad idea  
> to require accessible content to be made less accessible in the  
> course of perfectly legal processing.

Congratulations Scott. You're the first person to articulate a  
legitimate and coherent concern on this suggestion after lengthy back- 
and-forth for hours. Please add it to the wiki. I wish I had some  
prize to give you. I'm serious here.

Take care,
Rob

Received on Thursday, 5 July 2007 21:19:05 UTC