- From: Michiel Bijl <michiel@agosto.nl>
- Date: Wed, 05 Nov 2014 10:01:59 +0000
- To: <www-style@w3.org>
Bruce Lawson brought the new alt attribute for generated content to my
attention on Twitter[1]. With all these icon fonts that float around the
web, I think it is a good thing you can specify an alt text. This does
bring up some concerns, though. As Bruce stated on Twitter[2]:
> Content in CSS *is* yuck. But the foo:before {content: "blah"} ship
> has sailed.
I do agree that content in CSS is yuck, but can definitely see the
advantages of generated content. 'content:' within ::before and ::after
takes a couple of values, one of which is 'attr(<identifier>)' [3]. This
way you can use the content of an attribute on the element the rule
applies to. I suggest we add the same value to the 'alt' attribute [4].
This could help with translations, but also uphold one of the core
principles of the web:
> Separation of Concerns
>
> HTML should allow separation of content and presentation. [5]
—Michiel Bijl
[1]: https://twitter.com/brucel/status/529920245126164480
[2]: https://twitter.com/brucel/status/529926547189534720
[3]:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/CR-CSS2-20090908/generate.html#propdef-content
[4]: http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-pseudo/#alt-property
[5]:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html-design-principles/#separation-of-concerns
Received on Thursday, 27 November 2014 15:49:05 UTC