[Bug 21566] User agents must present longdesc through normal interfaces.

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=21566

--- Comment #10 from Charles McCathieNevile <chaals@yandex-team.ru> ---
(In reply to comment #8)
> (In reply to comment #7)
> > Thinking about this, I am leaning to making the statement apply to valid
> > longdescs, and leaving the error case open for now since I don't think we
> > have enough experience to clearly define a best practice that should be
> > enforced by conformance requirements.
> 
> +1 Strongly support.
> 
>    However, I think the conditions for providing access to the longdesc URL
> should be be more fine grained, like so:
> 
> * URL should be non-empty

This is already required in the spec. I already fixed an editorial bug where
that wasn't clarified repeatedly in every possible place, but if there is
another one, please file it.

> * And URL should not cause parsing failure
>   http://url.spec.whatwg.org/#concept-parsed-url
> 
> Thus, if the value is the empty string, or if the URL is so malformed that
> it causes parsing failure, then it should be hidden. (In the 11th comment of
> bug 21439, I wrote about this:
> https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=21439#c11 )
> 
> What do you think, Charles? Would you lilke to have even stricter
> condidtions for making the longdesc accessible to the user? 

No. The agreement of the TF at this stage was to close this bug as suggested.
The following points were brought up in the discussion:
1. If user agents do present *everything* as if it were a valid URL, that
should conform (although it is recognised as not being the best quality of
implementation)
2. We don't know enough about what to do when things are not working out to be
prescriptive, so we should leave this open while we learn from implementation
experience.
3. Where the URL is valid, it needs to be made available to the user.

We could dig into allowing the UA to test whether the URL resolves to a valid
long description, but I think that would be getting a long way ahead of
ourselves. I don't know of any UA that does anything nearly as advanced, and
I'd rather get basic support. If there is a user agent that wants to do
something so good that they ignore conformance, well and good, but lets see
that before we start anticipating how it might work.

> One additional reason to go for the variant I propsoe, is that HTML 5.1 and
> HTML 5.0 have different requirements with regard to what a valid URL is as
> it seems to me that HTML 5.1/the URL standard (so far) permits spaces inside
> URLs. At the same time, what browser considers parsable, is probably much
> less likely to change than what is considered valid.

Actually, the Web Apps group has a URL spec as a deliverable, precisely to
replace the current fuzzy dependency of HTML on a spec that is incomplete and
has no planned completion date. I actually started the work of creating it
yesterday, although it will probably take me a few days to get it online (I'm
busy dealing with bugs like this instead). In my current thinking (I'm
*editing* not "authoring", so the working group may end up resolving otherwise)
it will follow a line more like the specs by TimBL, Masinter, Fielding, Dürst,
Suignard, McCahill… than the part-spec by Anne, and something with spaces in it
will not be a valid URL even if the spec defines a way to work with it.

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Received on Saturday, 4 May 2013 12:06:40 UTC