- From: Philip Taylor <pjt47@cam.ac.uk>
- Date: Fri, 08 Aug 2008 21:26:29 +0100
- To: Justin James <j_james@mindspring.com>
- CC: public-html@w3.org
Justin James wrote: > > I am beginning to wonder how much more brainpower we wish to bring to bear > on this extraordinarily specialized, specific, and niche use case. I raised this case because it is an instance of a more general problem. Just as photo-sharing sites like Flickr are a specific use case demonstrating the more general problem where a tool outputting HTML cannot provide a true textual alternative to all its images (hence HTML5 adding a feature to better address that problem), the LaTeX-to-<img> case demonstrates the more general problem where HTML 5's approach of applying different meaning to a specific syntax in attribute values makes it harder to write a conforming markup generator. There are other instances of the same problem - e.g. if I write a Web 2.0 Logo Generator that converts a user's text into an image in a certain typographical style, I would decide to set the alt text to be what the user typed in, because that's the closest the tool can get to an equivalent of the image; but then if the user types in some funky name for their site like "{Cuilr}", it'll trigger the special alt-attribute-gives-kind-rather-than-textual-equivalent processing in HTML 5 UAs, which is inappropriate and harmful here, so I'd have to worry about preventing that situation. The use of special syntax in the attribute value inconveniences every tool that generates markup based on user input, even when they have no need for or interest in the feature which that syntax is for. -- Philip Taylor pjt47@cam.ac.uk
Received on Friday, 8 August 2008 20:27:11 UTC