- From: Robert Burns <rob@robburns.com>
- Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2007 16:07:31 -0500
- To: Monika Trebo <mtrebo@stanford.edu>
- Cc: Thomas Broyer <t.broyer@gmail.com>, public-html@w3.org
HI Monika, On Jun 26, 2007, at 3:33 PM, Monika Trebo wrote: > > ... difference between @alt and @title > > -- @alt is designed to be alternative and required text description > of images that appears before the image loads (nice even for > sighted users, if web authors use big images that load slowly, or > for users with slow internet connection) or for text-only browsers > like lynx. > > -- @title can be used for many elements and is useful for sighted > users, too. @title can provide additional information about eg: > what is behind a link if the user runs the mouse over it. It can be > used to describe navigational elements, abbreviations... by > displaying pop-up tool tips. > > -- Meaningful @title text may provide useful information for search > engine spiders. > > > [..] Thank you for replying and providing those distinctions and examples. What's your view on the issue of adding @alt to the other embedded content elements (<object>, <video>, <audio>, etc.). It strikes me that the same usefulness that @alt brings to <img> it would also bring to these other elements. Also the other issue that has been raised in these threads (likely from my <object> example earlier in the thread) is whether @alt and @title might be redundant in the sense that since @title is already available on the embedded content elements, there would be no need to add @alt to those elements. One other issue that your example raises is the roll that @alt plays as standby content. Currently object@standby is listed as deprecated (dropped) in the draft. Do you think that's wise to drop? Or could object@alt serve the same roll? Again, I don't have real stong feelings on these, except that I feel strongly that HTML5 should try to make more sense out of all of these related, but subtly different semantic mechanisms: especially related to the non-text media, embedded elements and fallback content (specifically the elements <object>, <audio>, <video>, suggested <still>): @alt @title @standby <legend> (or <caption> or whatever we end up calling it) fallback content media file metadata (and also @longdesc for the legacy embedded content elements: <img> and <embed>) Similar issues could be related related to tables with the following attributes @summary td@abbr and th@abbr <caption> and also (less AT purely related): td@scope,, th@scope, td@headers, td@axis and th@axis Again, I think these attributes, elements, and other facilities all provide subtly different semantics. In my view HTML5 should carefully consider the distinct contribution each of these facilities make for authoring and consuming documents. Certainly before any of these are dropped, we should build some sense of direction (dare I say consensus) about it in the WG. What do you think? Take care, Rob
Received on Tuesday, 26 June 2007 21:07:42 UTC