- From: Jason White <jasonw@ariel.its.unimelb.edu.au>
- Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2007 19:34:33 +1000
- To: Joshue O Connor <joshue.oconnor@cfit.ie>
- Cc: "Gregory J. Rosmaita" <oedipus@hicom.net>, Maurice Carey <maurice@thymeonline.com>, HTML Working Group <public-html@w3.org>, wai-xtech@w3.org
On Fri, Jun 29, 2007 at 10:12:54AM +0100, Joshue O Connor wrote: > Another possibility is to multipurpose @alt so it also doubles up as a > LONGDESC. So you have one attribute that you can use for both purposes > as required? This is an interesting idea. I suppose TITLE could still be used to provide a short label for the image, independently of the longer description referred to by ALT, in cases where both a short label and a full description are warranted. The main problem with this proposal is that in processing the value of ALT, the user agent would have to determine whether it is a URI, then retrieve the associated resource if so, otherwise render the text of the attribute value. This would also leave the value of ALT syntactically unconstrained, whereas with a LONGDESC attribute, the syntax can be checked to ensure that it is a URI. Backward-compatibility with ua's that always render ALT would also serve as an argument against this proposal, though, in my view, not necessarily a fatal one.
Received on Friday, 29 June 2007 09:34:59 UTC