Re: Moving longdesc forward: Recap, updates, consensus

Hi Benjamin, Gregory, and Chaals,

>> 10.6.1 USER AGENT RENDERING (informative)
>> http://www.d.umn.edu/~lcarlson/research/ld-rendering.html
>>
>> I have updated the 10.6.1 User Agent rendering draft trying to
>> incorporate Chaals suggestion to add info on real world
>> implementations and Leif's suggestion to add info on iCab's
>> contextual-menu cursor. Is it okay?
>
> I'm not sure about this. It seems highly unusual for a W3C
> spec to refer to particular implementations by name. I think
> it would be better to use their implementations to inform our
> examples of how to implement them.

I can  certainly can remove it. Chaals?

> Chaals, did you really mean the spec text should call out existing
> implementations by name?
>
> I think it's perhaps worth discussing these use cases in the Change
> Proposal,
> in order to demonstrate that @longdesc could be used to provide solutions
> to them, if indeed we think it can. Seems to me your CP already does that,
> but we could perhaps evaluate @longdesc against other possible approaches?

The "Suggested Alternatives Are Not Viable Solutions" attempts to do
that in a general way.
http://www.w3.org/html/wg/wiki/ChangeProposals/InstateLongdesc#Suggested_Alternatives_Are_Not_Viable_Solutions

Is there a better way to incorporate that section with the use case
section or maybe cite more of the the use cases in in the "Suggested
Alternatives Are Not Viable Solutions" section could work. What do you
think Ben?

>> CHANGE PROPOSAL
>> http://www.w3.org/html/wg/wiki/ChangeProposals/InstateLongdesc
>>
>> No one has offered concrete suggestions to improve the change proposal
>> in the "Moving longdesc forward" thread. Does anyone have any?
>
> I disagree with the claim: "Recent research finds that obsoleting
> longdesc specifically breaks the web for over 150 sites in the wild
> that are using it to describe images." Obsoleting @longdesc does not
> require that implementations drop special behaviours for the @longdesc
> element. Anyone actually using @longdesc today must accept that it has
> limited support, independent of what W3C
> specs say.

Would it be better to reframe the 150 sites in terms of as backwards
compatibility? Or just drop it completely?

> I disagree with the "Hidden Meta-data Fallacy" section because I think
> it misses the point of the visible data principle, which is that
> visible data is less likely to be erroneous because most authors are
> more likely to spot visible errors. Ultimately, it seems to boil down
> to saying "longdesc" is discoverable, but that's undisputed so I think
> the argument is a waste of space that is not going to change any
> minds. I'd drop that section.

That section is based on Gregory's words. Gregory, are you okay with
dropping the follwing section?
http://www.w3.org/html/wg/wiki/ChangeProposals/InstateLongdesc#Hidden_Meta-data_Fallacy

> Under "Recent Research on Assistive Technology", "Thunder in
> combination with WebbIE" and "Window-Eyes" are listed as subitems
> of "SuperNova/Hal". I think they should be siblings rather than children.

Good catch.

> Under "Recent Research on Browsers" I see:
>
> "Longdesc Firefox Extension by Patrick H. Lauke - adds a "View Image
> Longdesc" option to the image context menu that activates the link to
> the long description (over 23,000 downloads)
> "Longdesc for Linux for Firefox 4 by Patrick H. Lauke - allows one to
> view image's longdesc from the context menu"
>
> I think these are the same thing and should not be listed twice.

Another Good catch.

> Also, I think we should openly state that Home Page Reader stopped
> being maintained half a decade ago, if we're going to cite it
> as an example implementation.

We certainly can do that.

Thanks Ben.

Best Regards,
Laura


-- 
Laura L. Carlson

Received on Friday, 6 May 2011 01:34:35 UTC