Re: fear of "invisible metadata"

At 16:40 -0400 UTC, on 2007-06-21, Maurice Carey wrote:

> On 6/19/07 2:32 PM, "Craig Francis" <craig@synergycms.com> wrote:

[...]

> In an html5 world...
>
> <figure>
>   <img>
>   <caption>
> </figure>
> ... Not need for alt there, the vision impaired user would know that the
> figure is of a....whatever the captions says.

If you have a picture of you, with a caption saying "Maurice Carey", then
that caption is most certainly not an *alternative* to what's in the picture.

People communicate through speech, text, music, images, touch, etc. An image
is the expression of something through one of those forms. The alt attribute
exists to communicate the *same* through another form.

Each form of communication lends itself better for expressing certain things
than another. That's why it is often quite difficult to come up with good ALT
text.

[...]

> <li><a><img title="a butterfly" alt="an image of a butterfly"></a></li>
>
> That seems sort of pointlessly repetitive to me.

Indeed. The text "an image of a butterfly" is complementary, not an
alternative. It can make sense for a title attribute but is useless as ALT
text.


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

Received on Friday, 22 June 2007 11:26:11 UTC