Re: comments on 'private use' section of proposal - Sanity check

On Jul 18, 2010, at 6:45 AM, Steven Faulkner wrote:

> A sanity check,
> 
> .8.1.1.11 An image in an e-mail or private document intended for a specific person who is known to be able to view images
> 
> "This section does not apply to documents that are publicly accessible, or whose target audience is not necessarily personally known to the author, such as documents on a Web site, e-mails sent to public mailing lists, or software documentation."
> 
> http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/embedded-content-1.html#an-image-in-an-e-mail-or-private-document-intended-for-a-specific-person-who-is-known-to-be-able-to-view-images
> 
> 
> 
> The private email exception does not apply to  apply to a class of authoring tools, it only applies if you send a private email to a person or people who you know can see the image.
> 
> So depending on who I send it to, will decide if it is conforming or non conforming so unless the email client provides the ability for me to add a text alternative it WILL allow non conforming documents to be published.

One thing that's not entirely clear to me is why the private communication exception is needed, given the generator exception. It seems to me that mail clients producing HTML should include the generator meta tag. This seems simpler than relying on a manual setting in the conformance checker.

It seems the only additional case covered by the private communication exception is hand-authored HTML sent as email. While I won't claim this never happens, I would guess it is extremely rare, and perhaps such a narrow use case does not need special handling. (There is also the possibility of non-email hand-authored HTML documents being exchanged with a known fixed audience, but this too seems like a very rare scenario.)

On the other hand, Laura's change proposal opposes the generator exception as well, so I am not sure this line of reasoning gets us anywhere.

Regards,
Maciej