Re: Is Flickr an Edge Case? (was Re: HTML Action Item 54)

Neither "important image", "photo" chart" "diagram" or anything else like 
these descriptions in alt tell me anything.  I suspect though that they are 
meant to convey something useful to preprocessors and I dread this.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "John Foliot" <foliot@wats.ca>
To: "'Andrew Sidwell'" <w3c@andrewsidwell.co.uk>; "'Ian Hickson'" 
<ian@hixie.ch>
Cc: "'Maciej Stachowiak'" <mjs@apple.com>; <public-html@w3.org>; "'W3C 
WAI-XTECH'" <wai-xtech@w3.org>; <wai-liaison@w3.org>; "'HTML4All'" 
<list@html4all.org>
Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2008 8:05 PM
Subject: RE: Is Flickr an Edge Case? (was Re: HTML Action Item 54)



Andrew Sidwell wrote:
> John Foliot wrote:
>> Really?  As an avid follower of *all* of the postings to both the
>> public-html and wai-xtech mailing lists (two official means to
>> discuss
>> this
>> topic) I have not heard a peep from Ian.  If these proposals have
>> surfaced in your back-room IRC channel or on the what-wg mailing
>> list than I'm sorry, I read neither as they are outside of the
>> official W3C process.
>
> Please see
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2008May/0073.html for
> ths post in question.
>

I stand corrected and apologize for not remembering this post.  Ian's
suggestion certainly seems reasonable, and far superior to an optional @alt.

I note from his example that the text equivalent is the text inside of the
<legend> element - is it reasonable to presume then that:

<figure>
    <img src="1100670787_6a7c664aef.jpg" alt="Photo"
         importantimage="importantimage"/>
</figure>

Would be non-conformant, as there is no longer any text directly associated
with the image in question?

I suppose that a fair bit of useful data is already being transmitted simply
by the fact that the image is identified as a photo* and that it is
important, and so I guess it /could/ be considered complete, although less
than useful.

Is introducing a new attribute [importantimage] better than sticking with
existing attributes and simply introducing new, reserved values?  From an
implementation perspective, which is easier to add to future user-agents?

(* Photo.  What if, instead it is an illustration, or a chart, or some other
form of iconic or visual marker?  Would a collection of reserved values be
appropriate here?)

JF

Received on Wednesday, 28 May 2008 00:15:33 UTC