Re: Usage of Alt

On 11/24/2012 03:03 PM, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>
> Hi Robin,
>
> Could you provide some guidance on how to read the report and/or a
> quantitative summary of its findings? I am having a hard time
> determining from the raw data which aspects of the HTML specification
> are not paving the cow paths.
>
> For example, for an entry like this (quoted with its original styling):
>
>
>>     /Projects/html/scratch/dataset/html/index-1115.html
>>
>> Text size: navigation arrow increase decrease | print page
>> Text size: increase navigation arrow decrease | print page
>
> What is this telling me about what happened in the markup, and what
> conclusion should I draw from this?

Searching for that text, I came across the following page that contains 
what appears to be a match: http://www.commbank.com.au/

Specifically, the full markup looks like this:

<p><font color="#5D537A">Text size:</font> <img 
src="/images/global/navArrowOrange.gif" width="5" height="8" 
alt="navigation arrow" /> <a href="#" 
onclick="TextSize.increase();"><font color="#5D537A">increase</font></a> 
<img src="/images/global/navArrowOrange.gif" width="5" height="8" 
alt="navigation arrow" /> <a href="#" 
onclick="TextSize.decrease();"><font color="#5D537A">decrease</font></a> 
<span>|</span> <a href="javascript:window.print();"><font 
color="#5D537A">print page</font></a></p>

Like you, I'm not sure what conclusion to draw from this, but if there 
are portions of the HTML5 specification that are indeed controversial, I 
would hope that members of the working group would open/reopen bug 
reports, and that the editors would seek to adopt text that is less 
objectionable.

> Regards,
> Maciej

- Sam Ruby

> On Nov 23, 2012, at 7:47 AM, Robin Berjon <robin@w3.org
> <mailto:robin@w3.org>> wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> as indicated in the CfC caveat for the publication of the HTML CR, in
>> the discussion of the AltTech specification with its objection, and,
>> you know, ISSUE-31, there is some amount of disagreement about the
>> advice to be given about our poor old alt attribute.
>>
>> In order to get a feel for how it was actually used in the wild, I
>> quickly generated a usage report to see if we could make some useful
>> inferences. I don't claim that it's a solution, or that it is decisive
>> data, but it might help.
>>
>> You can read more at: http://htmlwg.org/alt-usage/.
>>
>> From looking at the inline variant of the report, my sense is that the
>> HTML specification as currently drafted is not paving the cow paths.
>>
>> Thoughts, suggestions for improvements, welcome.
>>
>> --
>> Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon
>>
>

Received on Saturday, 24 November 2012 21:21:56 UTC