- From: Thomas Broyer <t.broyer@gmail.com>
- Date: Wed, 10 Oct 2007 10:03:59 +0200
- To: public-html@w3.org
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