Re: alt and authoring practices

On May 3, 2008, at 20:38 , Daniel Glazman wrote:

> 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.

How can your users write good alt text without having knowledge about  
its purpose?

> 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.

How about a checkbox labeled "Purely Decorative" and a text field  
labeled "Textual Alternative" (if the checkbox is checked, disable  
text field and emit alt=""; if the checkbox is unchecked and text  
field empty, emit no alt attribute)?

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/