On Fri, 11 Apr 2008, Matt Morgan-May wrote: > > However, for those who do validate, requiring alt is the only way to get > the author to signal his or her intent. To remove that barrier forces us > to assume that _all_ instances of <img> without alt present on the web > simply couldn't be expressed throws out the bathwater, the baby, the > tub, the pipes, and a chunk of the sewer line. I think validators should still warn about missing alt="" -- after all, the case for which omitting alt is allowed is still quite rare. It's like, to use a recent example, double-encoded UTF-8 (that is, UTF-8 that, when decoded to codepoints, reencoded as ISO-8859-1, and redecoded as UTF-8, results in the author's originally intended content). It's conforming, it's just not what the author intended. Validators should warn the users about such cases. > Even if there is no reasonable text equivalent, there's nothing to say > that a blind user wouldn't want to be informed of that image. Exactly. But if you give alt="", the image will be removed from the output stream, _without_ telling the user about its existence. -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'Received on Friday, 11 April 2008 20:24:59 GMT
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