Re: New issue: IMG section of HTML5 draft contradicts WCAG 1 & WCAG 2 (draft)

On Fri, 11 Apr 2008, Benoit Piette wrote:
> 
> Personally, I think something along the lines of
> 
> <img src="toto.png" noalt >
> 
> in pages that have a meta tag saying that the content is generated and 
> all semantic information is not necessarily available to user agents 
> would not be ambiguous in any way.

Why would it be any less ambiguous than not having an attribute at all?

I considered "noalt". The problem is that if the concern is validation, 
how do we distinguish cases where the user has forgotten to provide alt="" 
text and has accidentally copy-and-pasted the noalt marker, from cases 
where the user has intentionally marked the image as not having alt text 
available despite needing some?

All adding "noalt" does is increase the number of possible errors -- now 
we have to deal with no alt, noalt at the wrong time, alt with the wrong 
value, and both noalt and alt provided at the same time. With just "alt", 
we only have to worry about no alt and alt with the wrong value. The net 
effect isn't an improvement.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Friday, 11 April 2008 17:03:29 UTC