Re: Mandatory and Important

We just went through extensive discussion and communication with 
other groups to work out how to make alt mandatory, and make it clear 
how to abide by that mandate in a whole host of situations, with 
examples.

I personally do not see a problem with moving the discussion and 
examples to the WCAG documents, if that group wishes, but I 
uncomfortable with going backwards, in two senses:
a) reverting to the lack of clarity in the HTML4 situation, which 
resulted in alt="" being (ab)used, or alt being omitted, too often 
(IMHO);
b) relaxing the formal requirement that alt be present (which is 
similar to (a)).

As far as I can see, the G in WCAG etc. stands for guidelines, 
guidelines which should be read and interpreted by the writers of 
specs as well as the writers of web sites.  It's not the WCAG job to 
make normative requirements in say HTML, it's ours.

So, my feeling is that I haven't seen an actual problem with the 
current text in HTML5, beyond the reasonable recommendation that at 
some point the text that is more about discussion and examples should 
probably move somewhere out of the formal spec. (and that 'somewhere 
else' would ideally be in an accessibility document, probably).
-- 
David Singer
Apple/QuickTime

Received on Thursday, 21 August 2008 12:27:21 UTC