Re: Investigating the proposed alt attribute recommendations in HTML 5

(Reply to the earlier parts of the message sent to www-archive.)

On Sep 11, 2007, at 21:36, John Foliot wrote:
[...]
> But we *must* think beyond creating a spec that serves "JAWS".   
> Once upon a
> time Netscape 4 ruled the web, and creating a spec that caters to a  
> single
> technology is wrong.

I'm not advocating catering to a single technology. However, as I  
understood the message that started this thread, the point the  
message made was that what the draft says now is not good because it  
exposes a major usability bug in the current version of JAWS.

[...]
> Suggesting however that allowing "nothing" as part of the spec
> cannot be seen as a positive step forward - a message that has been
> consistent from some quarters since the beginning.

The issue remains, though, that there exist and will exist unattended  
systems that put images on generated HTML pages and don't have human- 
authored alt text available. Document conformance requirements need  
to be set in such a way that developers of unattended systems will  
end up doing the least harm when making their systems meet machine- 
checkable conformance criteria.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/