- From: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
- Date: Thu, 15 May 2008 10:35:32 +0300
- To: Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky@mit.edu>
- Cc: HTML Working Group <public-html@w3.org>, W3C WAI-XTECH <wai-xtech@w3.org>
On May 14, 2008, at 23:28, Boris Zbarsky wrote: > Are people concerned about the effects of decisions regarding @alt > on authors who do not use validators? If so, is there any > indication (again, from studies or surveys) as to how the @alt > syntactic requirements come to affect such authors? It may be that > modifying the information that flows along these channels is just as > important as anything the validator does, if not more. Yes, I am concerned about the effects regarding alt in cases where the document author is not using a validator but the developer of the software that (s)he is using is aware of the HTML syntax definition and wants to, as a matter of software developer professionalism and pride, ensure that all the output streams produced by the software pass a machine-administered HTML syntax check. I don't have quantitative data about how often software developers want to ensure that the output streams of their software are syntactically correct, but ad hoc observations about HTML generator writers and knowledge about how I myself think as a software developer suggest that the issue is not insignificant. The problem with the @noalt proposal is that while it may have some merit in cases where a person writes HTML markup by hand and uses a validator him/herself, in this kind of generator case @noalt adds no usefulness because the attribute would be inserted automatically to meet the definition of correct syntax. -- Henri Sivonen hsivonen@iki.fi http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
Received on Thursday, 15 May 2008 07:36:14 UTC