Re: ISSUE-30 (Longdesc) Change Proposal

On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 4:36 AM, Joshue O Connor <joshue.oconnor@cfit.ie> wrote:
> Jonas Sicking wrote:
>> Given the trajectory for @longdesc over the past 10 years, I think
>> there's good reason to believe that implementations will support ARIA
>> before @longdesc sees any significant uptake.
>
> I would be inclined to agree, but are we taking about vendors or
> authors?

I was saying that I think that implementaions will support ARIA before
authors will start significantly using either @aria-describedby or
@longdesc. Thus I don't think implementation support will be a
limiting factor for authors.

> If (as Chaals pointed out), implementation in a browser may be
> relatively trivial and /if/ it is a case that it could be beneficial for
> @longdesc to be dusted off and revitalized (as such) - I think this may
> be worth exploring.
>
> For authors, re-animating use of @longdesc would tie into the paving the
> cowpaths mantra - there may not have been a cow down this road for
> sometime, but /if/ there is a ghost of a path I would be interested in
> exploring it.

I agree that if there is a cowpath we should definitely explore it,
and quite likely standardize it. This is why I think that keeping @alt
in the spec is the right thing to do.

However I don't see a cowpath for @longdesc given how little it's been used.

Looking at the "ghost path" for @longdesc seems to indicate that its
syntax was a poor one given that even the people that used @longdesc,
missunderstood it to the extent that they didn't even fill out a URI.

/ Jonas

Received on Friday, 30 October 2009 15:32:05 UTC