Re: alt crazyness (Re: alt and authoring practices)

Smylers wrote:

>> 3. when I read something like "When the alt attribute is missing, the
>>    image represents a key part of the content. Non-visual user agents
>>    should apply image analysis heuristics to help the user make sense
>>    of the image.", I can't believe my eyes...
> 
> Why?  That sounds entirely plausible to me.

Plausible and not implementable. A conformance checker will never know
what precisely is author's intent. And I don't expect non-visual user
agents to implement such image analysis heuristics just because spec
authors think they'll do it. From an implementation's POV, that's plain
crazy, will double or triple the size of implementations and will
probably never be good enough to serve the user efficiently.

> I'm not sure that claims like that are helpful.  I would've expected alt
> to be compulsory in HTML 5 until I read the spec and saw why it makes
> sense to omit it in situations where it's impossible to know what it is,
> and was persuaded that was the right thing to do.
> 
> I could be persuaded to change my mind by arguments on merit; but merely
> stating that you can't believe why other people don't agree with you
> doesn't really move us on.

I have no time for rhetorics. Just the fact the alt section is what it
is today - and why it is what it is today - scares me to death about the
whole html5 doc. Reminds me of the other "kill the style attribute"
crazyness.

</Daniel>

Received on Saturday, 3 May 2008 09:23:51 UTC