Re: Images and alternative text

Leif Halvard Silli wrote:
>> Thing is, in some communities sending TeX as part of your text message 
>> is considered perfectly reasonable, at least for simple equations.  So 
>> a lot of people don't think of it as "source code" but as simply 
>> another notation, one well-suited for plaintext communication.
> 
> Yes, apparently this is so. But I consider that to be a "private 
> agreement" and not part of HTML.

So is anything that uses any words that aren't common knowledge. 
Whatever "common knowledge" means.

> I am against 
> the fact that there is nothing in the source code of e.g. Wikipedia or 
> MathML 2.0 (which follows the same cowpath - plus it also uses 
> <blockquote> for indenting) which informs us that this is LaTeX.

I am by no means opposed to extending <img> to be able to indicate more 
metainformation about its alt text.

> There has been some debates here about whether User Agents, in 
> particular screen readers, should rely on heuristics to detect what 
> should have been written in @alt etc.

When the @alt is missing, right?

> But here in _this_ case, suddenly we hear from what I am so free as to 
> characterize as "the other side", that putting LaTeX source code into 
> @alt - just like that - is OK.

I sense that you're implying there's a contradiction here, but I'm sort 
of failing to spot it, if so.

> There should be a microformat or something, for how to put LaTeX into @alt.

That's a distinct possibility (though note that the core issue is not 
limited to LaTeX).

-Boris

Received on Monday, 11 August 2008 03:34:52 UTC