Re: What now ALT?

2007/10/9, Maurice Carey:
>
> If the image has NO VALUE to anyone why does it still need an alt?

If an image has no value, it needs an alt with no value. The problem
arises when an image *is* the "value" of the page (photo gallery) or
similar: you could set alt to any value, it wouldn't correctly replace
the image, so should we do then?

I'm OK with the "no alt attribute" rule currently in the spec; and
validators should really show a big warning when an image has no alt
attribute –are you sure your image has so much value that no alternate
text would be appropriate?–, and a small warning when there is an alt
attribute but its value is empty –are you sure your image has no
value? couldn't you call it from a CSS stylesheet instead of using an
<img> element?– or looks like a filename –spacer.gif does not look
like human readable text, it looks like a filename–.

> >User Agents could be configured to deal with
> >an expected value such as this consistently (as could Adaptive Technology),
>
> If they can be configured to deal with alt="_none" why can't they just be
> configured to deal with an image with no alt value?

I think the problem people have with "no alt attribute" (or even "an
empty alt") is that it does not looks like an opt-in, while the cases
where you would be OK omitting the alt attribute should really need
you to explicitly tell your HTML editor that it's what you want. And
when your HTML editor is a bare text editor…

-- 
Thomas Broyer

Received on Wednesday, 10 October 2007 08:04:07 UTC