- From: Gez Lemon <gez.lemon@gmail.com>
- Date: Thu, 15 May 2008 15:38:23 +0100
- To: "Daniel Glazman" <daniel.glazman@disruptive-innovations.com>
- Cc: "Philip TAYLOR (Ret'd)" <P.Taylor@rhul.ac.uk>, "Dave Singer" <singer@apple.com>, "HTML Working Group" <public-html@w3.org>, "W3C WAI-XTECH" <wai-xtech@w3.org>
On 15/05/2008, Daniel Glazman <daniel.glazman@disruptive-innovations.com> wrote: > Philip TAYLOR (Ret'd) wrote: > > > > which seems to me to hit the nail on the head. ALT is mandatory, > > but if a user refuses to provide ALT text, then the editing tool > > is correct to emit INVALID HTML (and, presumably, to warn the user > > that this regrettable behaviour has been necessary). > > > > So conformance criteria for a tool include the possibility of non- > conformance for output instances. I think the test suite for > an authoring tool is going to be a bit of a syllogism. > > tool A is conformant because it outputs conformant instances > but since it should also be able to output non-conformant instances, > conformance is nill. So it's conformant and non-conformant at the same > time. > > And I hope nobody has certification in mind ! A tool is as good as its input - garbage in, garbage out. A compliant authoring tool can be used to generate non-compliant content. You might use a compliant authoring tool to create a table-based layout, which doesn't conform to the spec - that's not the authoring tool's fault. In the same way, if an author deliberately chooses not to provide alternative text, the output from the tool should be considered invalid. Gez -- _____________________________ Supplement your vitamins http://juicystudio.com
Received on Thursday, 15 May 2008 14:39:10 UTC