Re: conflation of issues or convergence of interests?

On Tuesday 2007-07-31 05:25 +0200, Sander Tekelenburg wrote:
> >> Empty title attributes are author mistakes (and should be warned for by HTML

> > They might not be an error but a deliberate way to work around the display
> >of alt as a tooltip:
> > You set up the page, the images nicely tagged with alt (well, not perfect
> >but close enough) and the client suddenly says: "hey, when I checked on my
> >computer all the images show some text when hovering them, I don't want
> >that.", so here comes an empty title to the rescue.
> 
> How is that not an authoring error? It's not the author's job fix UA bugs.

Web authors spend a significant portion of their time working around
UA bugs.  They want their page to be accessible to the portion of
their users with buggy browsers, just as they want their page to be
accessible to the portion who are blind, etc.  (Technically all
users have buggy browsers, but not all users have a browser with
every possible bug.)  In fact, they often care about making their
page accessible to groups of users in proportion to the size of the
groups (as rational economic behavior suggests they should).

This working group should be working on HTML in order to improve the
Web (for all participants, such as users, authors, and
implementors).  Therefore, when evaluating designs for new (or
existing) features, we should consider behavior (whether a "bug" or
not) of existing user agents that would prevent or discourage
authors from using that feature, since it affects how much the new
feature would help all of these participants.

-David

-- 
L. David Baron                                 http://dbaron.org/
Mozilla Corporation                       http://www.mozilla.com/