- From: Jim Jewett <jimjjewett@gmail.com>
- Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2008 12:59:03 -0400
- To: "Ian Hickson" <ian@hixie.ch>, joshue.oconnor@cfit.ie
- Cc: foliot@wats.ca, wai-xtech@w3.org, wai-liaison@w3.org, public-html@w3.org, list@html4all.org
Ian Hickson wrote: > ... I am skeptical that magic keywords won't be abused as much > as the simpler syntax we have now. If anything, > ... the longdesc="" attribute should show us how > much authors are likely to use nonsense values. > longdesc="" is supposed to take a URI, but a huge > fraction of longdesc="" attributes have strings that > are not URIs at all. I have some vague memory of once reading that longdesc was a string -- like alt, but longer and more detailed. That would also explain the longdesc="" values, as indicating either that the image was decorative (and should have alt="") or that the alt tag by itself was sufficient. (1) How many of those broken longdesc values are useful under that interpretation? (2) One reason that alt started to see usage was that some browsers started treating it as a tooltip. I'm not aware of any way for normal authors to verify their longdesc, short of view source. So I would expect longdesc to be an extreme case. Usage of reserved values for alt should be closer to regular alt usage, or at least to proper alt="" usage (minus the accidentally correct usage from tools that use alt="" everywhere). -jJ
Received on Wednesday, 16 April 2008 16:59:44 UTC