Re: CFC re ISSUE-31 Missing Alt

On Apr 29, 2010, at 4:18 AM, Laura Carlson wrote:

> Hi John and everyone,
>
>> I'm having a very hard time with this myself. How, fundamentally, is
>> crowd-sourcing and mining of obtuse metadata going to accurately  
>> supply
>> appropriate text alternatives to an image.
>
> I wonder if it would make sense for the  @missing (or
> @alt-not-asserted, or something of that  nature) to have a value that
> could suck in the repair (whatever that ends up being
> crowdsourced/metadata/etc. )

If such an attribute is added, I suggest giving it a brief name, e.g.  
'noalt'. 'noalt' has the advantage that it is fewer than 'alt=""',  
unlike the other options. Thus there will be less incentive to silence  
the validator with incorrect information just to save a few bytes.

I also think that vague names like "missing" or "incomplete" are  
likely to confuse authors (they sound like they're saying the resource  
pointed to by src is missing or incomplete).

I also do not think it is necessary to provide for the case of alt  
present but src missing. If a markup generator has some text but not  
an equivalent image, then the correct markup to emit is just the text,  
not an <img> tag with alt but no src. So despite the appealing  
symmetry, I don't think this provides for any real use cases, it just  
makes the rules harder to explain.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Thursday, 29 April 2010 14:45:30 UTC