- From: Andrew Sidwell <takkaria@gmail.com>
- Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2007 12:31:46 +0100
- To: Robert Burns <rob@robburns.com>
- CC: HTML Working Group <public-html@w3.org>
Robert Burns wrote: > > > On Jul 14, 2007, at 11:30 PM, Robert Burns wrote: >> If these same principles should not be applied to <object> then I >> could understand that. However, the only reason I can think of (and >> I'm asking for help here in understanding the objections) is that >> @longdesc is simply more difficult for authors and users to use >> (compared to <object> contents). Is it that @longdes either requires a >> separate round-trip to the server or instead, deployment of CSS or DOM >> calls to deal with concealing the local document fragment until that >> fallback is requested by the user agent or the user directly. Is that >> what everyone feels about this. Then just say so. Then I'll know >> you're understanding what I'm talking about, and we can stop beating >> the dead horse as Jon put it. > > I should add one caveat. If the sentiment expressed above is the > sentiment agreed to by everyone, it suggests to me that we should not be > deprecating @longdesc on element (not that we are, but the current draft > omits it). If anything, we could stand to lose @alt on <img> before we > could use the more flexible and richer @longdesc attribute. I'm not > saying we should get rid of either one, but we should definitely not get > rid of @longdesc. If @alt is therefore redundant (as others suggest it > is on <object>), we could consider deprecating that. I don't think such a suggestion is a useful one to make, because alt="" will *never* be redundant when the alternative is using another HTML page to provide fallback content, simply because the latter is a chore and won't be done by the vast majority of authors. (longdesc="" didn't even show up in the top 20 <img> attributes on the Google webstats survey [1], meaning that it appears on >1% of pages.) [1] http://code.google.com/webstats/2005-12/element-img.html Andrew Sidwell
Received on Sunday, 15 July 2007 11:31:55 UTC