Re: [w3ctag/design-reviews] Alternative Text for CSS Generated Content (#351)

We discussed this in today's call, and the use cases are valid. There is obviously the philosophical question of separation of style and markup, and we are generally in agreement that putting content in style is suboptimal. That said, as unshipping `content` is not really an option here, we would like to see this feature itself move forward.

Two points of feedback on the state of the spec:

1. Backwards compatibility: This has been raised, but leaving this as it still is a valid issue. As long as a duplicate declaration for incompatible browsers is a reliably usable mechanism, we don't feel strongly against this. (On a side note, it being unergonomic could potentially promote content authors to do it in markup rather than content. Or at least one can hope.)
2. Lack of a syntactic signifier of the purpose: This is a larger concern. In the current proposal, it is not obvious what the alt text declared in style is for. From a content author's perspective, the purpose of the `/ "something"` can be interpreted liberally (and is not obvious) on what purpose it serves; and this is concerning.

I would really like to see point 2 addressed. Without seeing this particular syntax (or looking up the relevant specs or MDN documentation) a content author who has inherited a stylesheet without being educated on the subject matter it wouldn't be obvious what purpose this serves. (and might end up deleting it, breaking accessibility)

Wrapping it around `alt()` would make the purpose a lot more obvious. I believe this has been proposed within the CSSWG, and we'd like to see this revisited if possible.

Unrelated to TAG feedback, one question is whether or not it would be useful for the alt to be inheritable, but only change out the image. I'm suspecting the use cases would be rather slim but this is just out of curiosity.

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