- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Sun, 4 May 2008 07:31:11 +0000 (UTC)
- To: Philip Taylor <pjt47@cam.ac.uk>
- Cc: Robert J Burns <rob@robburns.com>, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>, "public-html@w3.org" <public-html@w3.org>
On Sat, 3 May 2008, Philip Taylor wrote: > > So, the goal of the site's markup is to make sure the UA tells the user > clearly and concisely that there is an image here. It is up to the UA to > determine as much detail as possible about the image, and it is up to > the user to decide (based on context) that the image is important and > that it is worth looking at in detail. > > In that case, <img src="..." alt="External image"> seems to achieve the > goal: as long as UAs do not ignore images with alt text, the user will > be made aware that the image exists, and can ask their UA for further > details. Actually it doesn't, really. The intent of the alt="" attribute is to provide text that can be used to completely replace the image, and thus there isn't necessarily a way to distinguish this: <p><img src="x.png" alt="External image"></p> ...from this: <p>External image</p> ...in user agents that don't support images. In particular, a user agent like Lynx wouldn't distinguish the two cases above, but would show the image in the following case in a distinct UA-styled manner: <p><img src="x.png"></p> > (My interpretation of the current HTML5 spec is that alt="External > image" would be non-conforming, because it does not serve as a > substitute for the image - it serves only as a marker for the image and > an indicator that the image is 'external'. The spec should not be so > strict in what the alt text must be, else it force sites like this to > compromise their user experience in order to achieve conformance.) It is strict precisely to achieve a better user experience, as illustrated above. -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Sunday, 4 May 2008 07:31:53 UTC