Re: Mandatory and Important

John Foliot wrote:
> so in the end we have a
> situation where the only real "loser" is the claim of conformance.

Well, and the credibility of a standards organization that writes 
standards that are impossible to follow in certain cases that the 
standard covers.

Not that this is a big problem, apparently, since some standards 
organizations do produce such standards with regularity.

> The issue boils down to this: should incomplete still be sufficient to be
> conformant?  We argue no.

Why are we privileging some kinds of incompleteness over others? 
Because they're easier to detect by machine?  A document with every 
other word removed is pretty much "incomplete" in the sense of coneying 
the information, but conformant....  Of course a validator can't check 
this, just like it can't check correctness of the alt value (for now). 
I can see the "easy win" argument here: checking for existence of @alt 
is easy, and adding it is likely to improve completeness in many cases. 
  Is that basically the argument for making it required?

-Boris

P.S.  Still no opinion on making alt required, by the way.