- From: Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de>
- Date: Sat, 23 Aug 2008 12:33:39 +0200
- To: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- CC: Steven Faulkner <faulkner.steve@gmail.com>, public-html@w3.org, W3C WAI-XTECH <wai-xtech@w3.org>
Ian Hickson wrote: > ... > Speaking with my Google hat on for just this paragraph, I can assure you > that with Picasa Web Albums, if we offered our users the opportunity to > specify alternative text, most wouldn't use it, if we required them to Probably. But some would. > provide it, most would provide bogus text, and if we forced them to Yes. > provide useful alternative text, they would all find one of our > competitors' sites and give up on Picasa altogether. (Google hat off.) Yes. So that sounds like a reason not to require it, but not like a reason not to enable it. > In practice, photo sharing sites will never have alternative text > available for the vast majorty of their images. Pretending otherwise is > neither realistic nor productive. Yes. > ... For the record, I still strongly believe that document validity is the wrong approach to get more useful alt texts. Whenever I've seen fields being mandatory, but hard to fill, I've seen bogus contents appear. One example we just discussed is the HTTP Content-Type header -- people believed it is mandatory so filled it with broken defaults, and we're still suffering from that. BR, Julian
Received on Saturday, 23 August 2008 10:34:31 UTC