Re: img@relaxed CP [was: CfC: Close ISSUE-206: meta-generator by Amicable Resolution]

On Sat, Aug 4, 2012 at 3:51 PM, Steve Faulkner <faulkner.steve@gmail.com> wrote:
> You appear to have been selective in your quoting from the spec, directly
> below your "might" quote is the following:
>
> In a conforming document, the absence of the alt attribute indicates that
> the image is a key part of the content but that a textual replacement for
> the image was not available when the image was generated.

In a _conforming_ document. Consuming software (obviously) doesn't
know a document is conforming, so it can't make that inference about
images without @alt. There's also no simple way a developer ingesting
syndicated articles could make that inference about images without
@alt.

Also, I don't think the spec here is trying to make the distinction
between filler images in ingested articles and (say) diagrams, charts,
and illustrative photos that I was talking about with respect to
"key", but could be important to whether a user agents highlights the
presence of an image or not. What I'm getting it is a user might want
one behavior (hiding filler photos without alternative text) when
browsing a celebrity gossip site, and another behavior (alerting such
images) when trying to find the 2011 Sales graph on the corporate wiki
for inclusion in a presentation. What is noise and what is signal is
context dependent. So we ideally shouldn't do anything that would
break the existing configurability of such behavior in user agents.

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis

Received on Saturday, 4 August 2012 15:12:07 UTC