Re: alt and authoring practices

Robert J Burns wrote:

> What this means is that we are still looking for a use case for why any 
> authoring tool (or author for that matter) would need to omit the alt 
> attribute.

Being an authoring tool developer myself, I also wonder how I will
present the UI for the alt attribute since I do not want to require
HTML knowledge from users. I clearly don't see an HTML editing
tool aimed at beginners w/o technical knowledge asking

   What is your image intended to represent ?

    ( ) a phrase or paragraph with an alternative graphical
        representation
    ( ) an icon
    ( ) a graphical representation of some of the surrounding text
    ( ) a purely decorative image that doesn't add any information but is
        still specific to the surrounding content
    ( ) a key part of the content

So an authoring tool like Nvu has really two options only:

1. leave the alt attribute entirely optional
2. keep it mandatory

I'll stick to the latter.

</Daniel>