Re: Change proposal for ISSUE-85

Roy T. Fielding, Wed, 16 Jun 2010 17:16:12 -0700:
> On Jun 16, 2010, at 3:46 PM, Leif Halvard Silli wrote:
>> See the WAI CG Consensus document: [1] "automatic validators can detect 
>> the presence/absence of @alt but in general cannot certify the 
>> correctness of the text string." With @role="presentation", they can 
>> test the correctness better.
>> 
>> [1] http://www.w3.org/2009/06/Text-Alternatives-in-HTML5
> 
> Argh, that is seriously bogus reasoning on the part of WAI CG.

Regarding this blessing of yours: I don't know if it helps, but the 
last sentence ("With @role="presentation", they can 
test the correctness better"), was a product of mine.

> This will only result in authoring systems adding @role="presentation"
> by default as well.  What a friggin waste of bits.  No good can come
> from that.
> 
> @alt="" should imply @role="presentation" -- to suggest using both
> is such an incredible waste of everyone's time and money, not
> to mention Internet bandwidth.

I don't share your (and Ian's) view in this. If <img> defaults to 
role="img" - as suggested in the Consesus document, then an <img> with 
an empty @alt should cause an error in a validator, for lack of alt 
text. 

Though, I don't rule out that it would be best to save such an error 
message for a specific ARIA checking tool. Meaning that a basic 
validator should work as you say.
-- 
leif halvard silli

Received on Thursday, 17 June 2010 00:33:09 UTC