On Tuesday 2008-05-27 10:36 -0700, John Foliot wrote: > This is not what is being debated here however. What is being suggested is > that the technical specification be written to open a loop-hole that so far > has been closed: images must contain @alt if they are to be deemed > conformant. That millions of images lack @alt, or a valuable @alt value is > not open to discussion - I will concur that they exist. This alone is not a > reason to reverse the course and suggest that it's somehow OK, so we'll > re-write the spec to say that it is. It's not. Since the current penalty > for not having @alt is... NOTHING... I cannot see how the new spec helps > anyone save those who want conformant code without doing all that is > required to ensure conformance. So you're saying that you prefer people litter their meaningful images with alt="" so that it's harder to distingush the meaningful ones without useful alternate text from those that are purely decorative? > have a textual alternative to an image. If, as suggested, most photos are > viewed by a very few (your telephone analogy), then what is wrong with > adding alt="" to those millions of images viewed by the very few? The whole > argument falls flat on it's face. So that a user using a text-mode browser who *could* switch to another browser if they wanted to can know that there's content there, but can still have images that are purely decorative hidden by their alt="" ? Would you agree that something like alt="[PHOTO]" or alt="[IMAGE]" would be better for users in that case than alt=""? If so, would you agree that it's worth standardizing what should be used to mark such a case rather than having authors pick "[IMAGE]" or "[PHOTO]" or their own variant? -David -- L. David Baron http://dbaron.org/ Mozilla Corporation http://www.mozilla.com/Received on Tuesday, 27 May 2008 20:59:56 UTC
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