Re: fear of "invisible metadata"

Dan Connolly wrote:

> (b) I happened to peek at this message, but I stopped reading this
> thread a long time ago. Are we still talking about fear
> of "invisible metadata"? If there's anything substantive left
> to this thread, I strongly recommend starting over in a new thread.

Although the thread title is rather general, it is nonetheless
very pertinent to the most recent messages, to one of which
you are replying.  In essence, there is now debate as to
whether

 <IMG alt="..." longdesc="..." src="...">

might be better implemented as a container :

 <IMG src="...">
  fallback material, to be
  rendered if the image cannot be
 </>

and I, for one, have considerable sympathy with this point of view,
since although an image is generally speaking monolithic (and there-
fore could not logically be a container, any more than could -- say
-- a <BR> or an <HR>), so too are <OBJECT>s and thus we already
have a situation in which a monolithic element can be a container.

Since, however, <IMG> will not be parsed as a container in any
existing browser, there is almost certainly merit in considering
a new container element for HTML 5 called (for example) <IMAGE>.

It would, of course, be very nice to be able to reclaim <OBJECT>,
but I fear this is already a lost cause.

Philip Taylor

Received on Monday, 25 June 2007 16:13:47 UTC