Re: Flickr and alt

There is nothing less hard about providing for accessibility than not.

Your goal is understood.  The end result though needs to be syntactically 
correctness according to the spec is what I was getting at.  We cannot 
achieve either goal if we fork and yes, currently there is a temptation to 
fork.  one fork, it's compliant not to provide alt in some cases, the other 
fork, it's compliant to provide alt in some cases.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Boris Zbarsky" <bzbarsky@MIT.EDU>
To: "David Poehlman" <david.poehlman@handsontechnologeyes.com>
Cc: "W3C WAI-XTECH" <wai-xtech@w3.org>; <public-html@w3.org>
Sent: Tuesday, August 19, 2008 10:35 AM
Subject: Re: Flickr and alt



David Poehlman wrote:
> easy is a cop out.

Making things hard for the sake of making them hard is silly, though.

In fact, even making them hard for good reasons might not be desirable.

I sense more fundamental disagreements over the way the world works here...

> compliant is compliant.

That's a content-less statement.

> the spec should be written to
> achieve an end which is to provide clear information of syntactical
> correctness.

No.  It should be written to achieve the end of facilitating information
exchange between the document producer and document consumer.  Syntax is
a means to this end, not an end in itself.

> If we fork the spec, the fork of least resistance and most likely, less
> accessible in this case will be the one most travelled.

Who mentioned forking anything?

Note that the path of least resistance will be traveled no matter what:
that's just what happens when large numbers of people make independent
decisions.  Our goal (not just this working group, but the HTML
community in general) should be to make the path of least resistance be
the path that produces optimal results, by a combination of spec text,
authoring tools, mindset education, etc.  In other words, reduce
resistance in the directions that would help.  Note that reducing
resistance is much easier than increasing it, since we can't very well
force people to do things the hard way: we can only provide easier ways
of doing things.

-Boris

Received on Tuesday, 19 August 2008 14:49:53 UTC