Re: unifying alternate content across embedded content element types

Robert Burns wrote:
> [I]t strikes me that, if its useful to add
> a short alternate to an <img> element that perhaps already has a lengthy
> and semantically rich description as the target of a @longdesc
> attribute. then maybe it would be useful to do the same for other
> embedded content elements.

I think you misrepresent (unintentionally, I assume) the way round that
things occured.  First, there was alt="", then longdesc="" was added (in
HTML 4).  That is, longdesc was introduced to fix the shortcomings of
alt for those who needed it; alt wasn't introduced to add a shorter
version of longdesc.

Andrew Sidwell