[Bug 21439] The MAY w.r.t. treating invalid longdesc URLs as text, is harmful. Remove the harm - or remove the MAY.

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=21439

--- Comment #6 from Leif Halvard Silli <xn--mlform-iua@xn--mlform-iua.no> ---
6) The MAY option complicates things for authors. 

   EXAMPLE:

      <img src="jpeg.jpg" alt="Text." longdesc="foo bar.html"/>

   EXPLANATION: 

   If the longdesc URL happens to contain a space character, then the URL would
be invalid. And thus, per the current spec text’s MAY option, a conforming user
agent could choose to present the longdesc attribute’s content as the long
description itself.

   As a result, some users would be presented with the the content of the very
longdesc attribute, while users of user agents that do not implement the MAY
option, would get the content of the file "foo bar.html".

   And all this only because the author forgot to escape a space character.

   CONCLUSION:

   The result of the MAY option is that the longdesc attribute would become
less robust - both when compared with other attributes that takes a URL, and
also compared with status quo

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Received on Tuesday, 23 April 2013 03:25:14 UTC