Re: unifying alternate content across embedded content element types

Lachlan Hunt wrote:

> But let's consider the indexing bot for a moment.  Sites like YouTube 
> seem to provide fairly good search facilities, yet they obviously don't 
> search the video files themselves.  Rather, the video's title, 
> description and other content on the page fulfils those needs.

[...]

> What evidence is there to show that such authors will provide fallback 
> mechanisms, like a textual alternative for video, in HTML?

What evidence is there that YouTube users will add a relevant video 
title, description and other content when uploading a file?

As Robert Burns already pointed out, your argument about YouTube 
actually reinforces the point that textual/indexable alternatives may be 
necessary. So why not allow for the possibility of explicitly saying 
that a certain alternative is related directly to a video/audio/etc file?

This seems to boil down to: most authors won't bother doing it, or doing 
it right, so the language shouldn't even allow for the possibility of 
doing it like that in the first place.

Or, to put it into a "give us problems, not solutions" form: an author 
wants/needs to explicitly specify a structured HTML alternative for a 
multimedia file (audio/video/etc) that is unambiguously tied to the 
multimedia file's element (<audio>/<video>/etc)...what solutions are 
available to them?

P
-- 
Patrick H. Lauke
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Received on Saturday, 28 July 2007 02:59:55 UTC