Re: The alt="" attribute

On Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:35:48 +0200, Lachlan Hunt  
<lachlan.hunt@lachy.id.au> wrote:

> The way this is currently worded in the spec, it is ambiguous.  Consider  
> this recent article.
>
> http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080827-open-market-video-drm-aims-to-let-1000-retailers-bloom.html
>
> Just pretend for the sake of argument that the page was authored using  
> HTML5 and that an <article> element surrounded the article.  So it  
> contains an image of a presentation slide, without an alt attribute, and  
> the section does have a heading.  (For the benefit of those here who  
> can't see the image, the slide is actually briefly described in the last  
> paragraph of the article).  The other images used as links at the end of  
> the article for "Digg This", "Discuss" and "Print". do have alt text. So  
> this case would meet the condition in the spect that states:
>
> "The img element is the only img  element without an alt attribute in  
> its section, and its section has an associated heading."
>
> Is this case supposed to be considered conforming?  I would argue that  
> it shouldn't be considered conforming because the article heading  
> doesn't relate directly to the image, unlike, for example, the heading  
> of an image on a Flickr photo page.
>
> The spec could possilbly be made slight clearer if it actually said  
> something like what was proposed above: "[the heading] must include  
> sufficient information to orient the user.", or perhaps something even  
> clearer if possible.

Or perhaps it isn't appropriate to use the heading if the heading won't be  
about the image in common cases like the above, so the spec shouldn't use  
the heading.

-- 
Simon Pieters
Opera Software

Received on Friday, 29 August 2008 10:20:21 UTC