Re: alt and authoring practices and validation behaviour

The following is a post from Jason White to the HTML4all list that I 
think it a very interesting idea. Jason has given his permission for me 
to share the post with this group:

<quote>

Ideally, HTML validators would be like compilers, dividing errors into
different classes of severity - minimally, "warning" and "fatal error".

There would be a specification that describes what to treat as warnings, and
what as validation errors.

then <img src="http://example.org/mystery.png"> could be a warning, or at
least we could have a nice debate about its severity level.

Maybe the two options presently open, "fatal error" and "no error at all"
simply don't capture the spectrum of possibilities adequately.

It also appears to me that, if HTML 5 is committed to extensive user-agent
error handling, then the case of a missing @alt is one for which it would be
desirable to prescribe consistent fall-back behaviour. Once that is 
done, the
discussion seems to become a question of what validators (including 
validating
authoring tools) should accept as correct document instances.

</quote>

Josh

Received on Friday, 18 April 2008 10:50:40 UTC