- From: Robert Burns <rob@robburns.com>
- Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2007 16:03:45 -0500
- To: Sander Tekelenburg <st@isoc.nl>
- Cc: public-html@w3.org
On Jul 15, 2007, at 2:07 PM, Sander Tekelenburg wrote: > > At 16:45 +0900 UTC, on 2007-07-15, Charles McCathieNevile wrote: > >> On Sun, 15 Jul 2007 06:29:13 +0900, Sander Tekelenburg >> <st@isoc.nl> wrote: >> >>> What about this then: >>> >>> - Authors must use no more than n characters as the value of the alt >>> attribute. For longer alternatives authors must use longdesc. >> >> I don't think this makes sense, because as already noted there >> isn't some >> magic number of characters that is useful. Take into account the >> fact that >> some languages require far more characters for the same power of >> expression and you are walking into the trap of choosing bad >> alternatives. > > Yes, very true. But there already *is* a threshold today > <http://santek.no-ip.org/~st/tests/altlength/>. If your language > needs twice > as many characters as another, today that just means that you're > twice as > likely to have the tooltip disappear before you've read its contents. > > So yes, the problem you point out exists, but I don't see how what > I propose > makes it worse. On the contrary, being more clear about what is > meant with > "short" and "long" makes it easier for authors and UA implementors > to auhor > and implement @alt better. > Also, as I had suggested earlier, we could use a certain number of words rather than characters. Unicode takes great pains to define word boundaries in all of its scripts. So counting the number of words can be done through Unicode algorithms. And I think words is an equalizer across scripts in a way that characters just cannot accomplish. That is both in expressiveness and in time to read a text fragment, words will be a much stronger correlated predictor of how much can be said and how long it takes to read. I also think if the author conformance criteria sets the word limit lower than the limit for UA conformance it will help take care of the n+1 problem. That is if authors are told to stick to 20 words and UAs are told to truncate at 40 words, its only the author's way out of bounds that are going to get hit by the limit (or those who push the limit to the UA conformance guideline and ignore the author conformance). Take care, Rob
Received on Sunday, 15 July 2007 21:03:55 UTC