- From: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>
- Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2007 16:25:40 -0700
On Apr 21, 2007, at 11:30 AM, Jon Barnett wrote: > I've been following this and gathering thoughts. [...] > 2. Images that are content but don't represent text (though they > may be accompanied by a caption - even if the caption could be the > alt text, it would be redundant with the caption repeated in the > markup) > <p>These are my vacation photos: > <ul><li><img src="grandcanyon.jpg">My wife and I at the Grand > Canyon...</ul> [...] > For (2), authors have a few choices: > (a) Use the <img> tag and leave the alternate text blank. [...] > Requiring the alt attribute causes a problem here and simply > leaving the attribute's value blank doesn't clear up enough ambiguity. [...] > (c) Use the <object> tag with fallback content. This is probably > the most useful option doesn't naturally cause any problems. The > only real issue is that neither HTML4 nor HTML5 explicitly describe > (1) and (2), and say to use <img> for (1) and object for (2) How is an <object> with empty fallback content different from an <img> with an empty alt value? It seems like it is just as ambiguous, since if the fallback content were non-empty it should be substituted. I think a better option would be to distinguish alt="", and use that for images in the content that add no meaning as the draft says today, and no alt attribute at all for images that are meaningful, but where a text description is not available or appropriate. We could limit <img> with no alt attribute to content generated by WYSIWYG editors, in the same way as <font>. Or something like that. Basically we can distinguish the two cases by alt="" and entirely omitted alt. Regards, Maciej
Received on Saturday, 21 April 2007 16:25:40 UTC