Re: "image analysis heuristics" (ISSUE-66)

On Feb 5, 2010, at 8:15 AM, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
Maybe I'm missing something but it doesn't look to me like the paragraph is in that section (which is the section describing authoring requirements for alt). The nearest linkable id I can find is <http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#img-available>, but you have to scroll down a ways from there to get to the implementation requirements for alt.

Yes, your ID is closer to the text in question. If you look at the change Ian made, it's clearly made in exactly the same place the text was already.

http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/html5/spec/Overview.html?r1=1.3702&r2=1.3703&f=h

As was discussed on the list, this advice does not belong under this section, but in the Web Browsers section.

Secondly, after all this discussion on the list about this particular sentence, and after several of us (including yourself, Maciej, and Lachlan) came to some kind of agreement on what should be said (and more importantly, where it should be said), it's especially galling to see Ian unilaterally making a minor change that clearly shows his disregard for the WG's input.

I don't remember getting down to the level of a specific single wording, though we did come up with a number of suggestions. That being said, I'm more interested in hearing what further changes would lead to a change you are happy with. Do you have specific specific requests? (Also happy to hear from Lachlan or anyone else who has an opinion on the matter.)

I said here that I approved of your proposal to trim Lachlan's advice.

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2010Jan/1189.html

Take that, strip the specific advice, point to UAAG, put it in Web Browsers, and we're done. I'll volunteer to update the change proposal to that effect, if we can agree on it beforehand.

Can you explain how it fails to address it? It seems to me that the necessity of human-created @alt is made perfectly clear, particularly by the warning. Do you feel that it remains less than perfectly clear? Are you concerned that it may still seem like repair is "sufficient"?

For one thing, I still think the document as a whole is better off without that entire passage than with it. Ian's edit only takes one poor example to support the previous sentence and replaces it with one that's slightly less poor. We did also discuss the limitations of OCR, and why it's not a significant improvement:

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2010Jan/1103.html
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2010Jan/1107.html

I don't think Ian said this is the only or final change he's willing to make. He just took a shot at it, and it seems like he addressed at least part of the concerns in your rationale. Can you please try to give him some constructive feedback about his efforts? If we really can't come to consensus, then we can settle this through Working Group decision. But I think it's a little hasty to give up after one round of changes.

My advice to Ian is, when addressing an issue on the table, read the messages on the list for information, rather than just asking on IRC, and acting on a misinformed response:

http://krijnhoetmer.nl/irc-logs/whatwg/20100205#l-152

I thought we were pretty close to consensus on this. I'd rather see it all the way through. As I said, I can take the next stab at what the text should be, borrowing from Lachlan's proposal and filtered through your advice.

Thanks,
m