Re: ISSUE-30 (Longdesc) Change Proposal

On Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:53:15 +0100, Charles McCathieNevile
<chaals@opera.com> wrote:

> I would like to propose that the longdesc attribute from HTML 4 be  
> retained in HTML 5 as an allowed attribute on images.

Note that I don't propose to extend longdesc to video and audio elements.
In part because I think we can get those done better from the get-go with
a content model, and in part because the implementation of UI in those
cases is a fair bit harder and we don't seem to have a lot of experience
to go on.

[...]
> RATIONALE:

A couple of additional points:
1. Longdesc (like the proposed figure element) explicitly associates
description.

Unlike alt, the longdesc of an image actually gives a description of what
is depicted, which doesn't normally change for a given image. This makes
it relatively easy to re-use sensibly in content management systems.

It is of course possible to stuff the longdesc with bogus text to trap
public-web crawlers like google, but it is equally possible for public
search engines to simply ignore it in the way that they ignore certain
other useful content that has been tried by black-hat SEO. For the
non-public web (a huge part of the web as a whole - how many intranets are
*not* web-based now?) where spamming is not an issue, this can provide the
ability to manage images much more easily by having a significant amount
of searchable text associated.

2. Longdesc works very simply in cases where design guidelines do not
allow for additional text on the screen. I am all in favour of visible
metadata, but it turns out that like in many companies the people who have
the final say on what we publish are not as keen on some of it. Invisible
metadata is often better than none at all, even though there are cases of
it not being as good. And it doesn't require the complex 2-step being used
with aria-describedby.

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile  Opera Software, Standards Group
         je parle français -- hablo español -- jeg lærer norsk
http://my.opera.com/chaals       Try Opera: http://www.opera.com

Received on Monday, 9 November 2009 14:10:12 UTC