Re: conflation of issues or convergence of interests?

At 21:17 -0700 UTC, on 2007-07-30, L. David Baron wrote:

> On Tuesday 2007-07-31 05:25 +0200, Sander Tekelenburg wrote:

[... title="" to suppress @alt tooltips in a some specific UA]

>> 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

I can't follow. Which definition of accessible are you using here?

>, just as they want their page to be
> accessible to the portion who are blind, etc.

But in this particular example we're talking about an authoring trick that
makes the page less accessible to blind (and other) users, aren't we?

[...]

> 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

or existing

> feature would help all of these participants.

Agreed.

Making that concrete for this example, that means we need to kill @alt (would
already be good to kill img anyway). Taking backwards compatibiity (pre-HTML5
UAs) onto consideration, killing img and @alt can only be achieved by keeping
them, but providing authors with something very clearly better. <object> is a
potential candidate. It has some things going for it, but also some serious
problems that would need to be solved first. If they cannot be solved, then
something like the earlier suggested <picture> would seem be the only
realistic option. (Well, at least I haven't seen any more realistic scenarios
pop up yet.)


-- 
Sander Tekelenburg
The Web Repair Initiative: <http://webrepair.org/>

Received on Tuesday, 31 July 2007 06:39:50 UTC