W3C home > Mailing lists > Public > public-html@w3.org > May 2008

Re: alt and authoring practices

From: Daniel Glazman <daniel.glazman@disruptive-innovations.com>
Date: Sat, 03 May 2008 19:38:34 +0200
Message-ID: <481CA31A.4050808@disruptive-innovations.com>
To: Robert J Burns <rob@robburns.com>
Cc: Smylers <Smylers@stripey.com>, HTML Working Group <public-html@w3.org>

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>
Received on Saturday, 3 May 2008 17:39:22 UTC

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