- From: Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis <bhawkeslewis@googlemail.com>
- Date: Sat, 4 Aug 2012 16:11:17 +0100
- To: Steve Faulkner <faulkner.steve@gmail.com>
- Cc: "Michael[tm] Smith" <mike@w3.org>, "public-html@w3.org" <public-html@w3.org>, HTML AccessibilityTask Force <public-html-a11y@w3.org>, John Foliot <john@foliot.ca>
On Sat, Aug 4, 2012 at 3:51 PM, Steve Faulkner <faulkner.steve@gmail.com> wrote: > You appear to have been selective in your quoting from the spec, directly > below your "might" quote is the following: > > In a conforming document, the absence of the alt attribute indicates that > the image is a key part of the content but that a textual replacement for > the image was not available when the image was generated. In a _conforming_ document. Consuming software (obviously) doesn't know a document is conforming, so it can't make that inference about images without @alt. There's also no simple way a developer ingesting syndicated articles could make that inference about images without @alt. Also, I don't think the spec here is trying to make the distinction between filler images in ingested articles and (say) diagrams, charts, and illustrative photos that I was talking about with respect to "key", but could be important to whether a user agents highlights the presence of an image or not. What I'm getting it is a user might want one behavior (hiding filler photos without alternative text) when browsing a celebrity gossip site, and another behavior (alerting such images) when trying to find the 2011 Sales graph on the corporate wiki for inclusion in a presentation. What is noise and what is signal is context dependent. So we ideally shouldn't do anything that would break the existing configurability of such behavior in user agents. -- Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
Received on Saturday, 4 August 2012 15:12:06 UTC