Re: handling fallback content for still images

On 4 Jul 2007, at 1853, Robert Burns wrote:

> I had another thought about a a long-term solution (and basically  
> this is about long-term solutions) anyway.. Is it possible that, by  
> moving to an xml serialization, this problem will be solved? In  
> other words, can we just do <img src="myimage' >fallback</img>  
> whenever HTML5 content is served as XML. To me this should work (at  
> least as a complement to the other solutions).

Forgive me if this point has already been covered -- I may have  
overlooked it in the discussion.

HTML5 is a language with two serializations (I'll call them): HTML/ 
xml and HTML5/html. These are both representations of the same  
document. Both serializations of a document must parse identically,  
otherwise they aren't serializations of the same language. There is a  
simple test to ensure that: take a document in one serialization,  
parse it, generate the other serialization from it, then parse the  
other serialization and require the parsed documents are identical.

With this method of <img> fallback, **the fallback content must be  
discarded** when the document is serialized as HTML5/html. Thus, my  
simple test would fail.

Converting an HTML5 document from one serialization to the other is a  
perfectly legal operation. I feel strongly that it is a bad idea to  
require accessible content to be made less accessible in the course  
of perfectly legal processing.

scott.

Received on Thursday, 5 July 2007 21:08:22 UTC