Re: [html4all] HTML5 Alternative Text, and Authoring Tools

On May 14, 2008, at 23:28, Boris Zbarsky wrote:

> Are people concerned about the effects of decisions regarding @alt  
> on authors who do not use validators?  If so, is there any  
> indication (again, from studies or surveys) as to how the @alt  
> syntactic requirements come to affect such authors?  It may be that  
> modifying the information that flows along these channels is just as  
> important as anything the validator does, if not more.


Yes, I am concerned about the effects regarding alt in cases where the  
document author is not using a validator but the developer of the  
software that (s)he is using is aware of the HTML syntax definition  
and wants to, as a matter of software developer professionalism and  
pride, ensure that all the output streams produced by the software  
pass a machine-administered HTML syntax check.

I don't have quantitative data about how often software developers  
want to ensure that the output streams of their software are  
syntactically correct, but ad hoc observations about HTML generator  
writers and knowledge about how I myself think as a software developer  
suggest that the issue is not insignificant.

The problem with the @noalt proposal is that while it may have some  
merit in cases where a person writes HTML markup by hand and uses a  
validator him/herself, in this kind of generator case @noalt adds no  
usefulness because the attribute would be inserted automatically to  
meet the definition of correct syntax.

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

Received on Thursday, 15 May 2008 07:36:17 UTC