- From: James Graham <jg307@cam.ac.uk>
- Date: Wed, 15 Aug 2007 21:52:23 +0100
- To: "Gregory J. Rosmaita" <oedipus@hicom.net>
- Cc: HTMLWG <public-html@w3.org>
Gregory J. Rosmaita wrote: > baby steps? you're talking about "baby steps" while the baby's still in > the incubator? the baby won't survive for very long as long as the > following is in the HTML5 draft: (as an aside this comes across, to me, as needless hyperbole). and, most importantly, if, in fact, an "image > represents a key part of the content." then it MUST be available to > everyone -- content is content, no matter what format that content is > encoded in... For millions of people with flickr accounts I suspect imposing a requirement to provide alt text for each image would quickly drive them to a different service that did not impose such a requirement. Yet the _point_ of flickr is the images. You cannot force people to enter metadata, much less the kind of high-quality metadata needed to explain the meaning of something visually complex like an abstract photograph. > quote > In certain rare cases, the image is simply a critical part of the content, > and there is no alternative text available. This could be the case, for > instance, in a photo gallery, where a user has uploaded 3000 photos > from a vacation trip, without providing any descriptions of the images. > The images are the whole point of the pages containing them. > > In such cases, the alt attribute must be omitted. > unquote > > MUST be omitted? you're telling us that a "critical part of the > content" MUST NOT have alt text defined for it? the alt attribute > is a REQUIRED attribute under HTML 4.x for good reason -- the same > reason why i have proposed on this list that the summary attribute > be made a REQUIRED attribute for TABLE I think there is a fine point here that may have been lost; the alt attribute is only to be omitted *if there is no alternative text available* i.e. the draft is attempting to distinguish alt="" meaning "this is a decorative image" from (no alt) meaning "no alt text has been supplied". -- "Mixed up signals Bullet train People snuffed out in the brutal rain" --Conner Oberst
Received on Wednesday, 15 August 2007 20:52:55 UTC