- From: Steve Faulkner <faulkner.steve@gmail.com>
- Date: Tue, 18 Sep 2012 22:53:38 +0100
- To: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>
- Cc: John Foliot <john@foliot.ca>, Sam Ruby <rubys@intertwingly.net>, public-html-a11y@w3.org
Hi all, As part of a survey of the top 10,000 web sites home pages carried out back in April [1] I grepped the instances of longdesc [2] this is what I found: 1938 matches in 86 files. You can review the data and draw your own conclusions. [1] http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2012/04/html-data-for-the-masses-data-dump/ [2] http://www.html5accessibility.com/HTML5data/dump/longdesc.html regards SteveF On 18 September 2012 22:34, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com> wrote: > > On Sep 18, 2012, at 2:16 PM, John Foliot <john@foliot.ca> wrote: > >> Maciej Stachowiak wrote: >>> >>> In addition to issues with these specific suggestions, keep in mind >>> that a previously raised concern with longdesc is that the corpus of >>> available longdesc content in the wild appears to have very high level >>> of bad content. >> >> I encourage you or others to provide specific proof of that assertion. >> >> On one hand, we have professional content producers that are creating >> @longdesc content today (Pearson Publishing and the Government of Canada to >> name 2), who, if nothing else, are probably quite good at document >> management practices. >> (http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-a11y/2012Sep/0210.html) >> >> On the other hand, we have a 5-year old blog post from Mark Pilgrim >> (http://blog.whatwg.org/the-longdesc-lottery) that alludes to statistics >> that Ian Hickson accrued, but was unwilling to publicly share. >> >> Do you have any other "proof" of this assertion? Have you or anyone else >> "surveyed" the corpus recently to see if there have been any changes to this >> assertion over the past 5 years? (Note: I have not, but given that serious >> content publishers are now using this attribute routinely in their work, I >> can only surmise it has improved significantly - but feel free to dispute >> that claim with proof to the contrary.) > > I'm just mentioning the point of concern that was raised. I am not interested in debating its validity. > > I will note that, if you want to persuade browser vendors to implement something, claiming that the evidence provided is not "proof" is unlikely to be a very compelling argument. Providing actual evidence to the contrary may be more compelling. > > The rest of your message seems to be more about whether longdesc should be "retained" in the spec in the sense of a conformance requirement that has no engineering impact. I don't have any substantive comments on that question. But I do note that it seems to be back in the mode of "mandate something that browsers won't implement". > > Regards, > Maciej > >
Received on Tuesday, 18 September 2012 21:54:47 UTC