- From: Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+w3c@gmail.com>
- Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 18:52:03 -0400
On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 5:28 PM, Benjamin M. Schwartz <bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu> wrote: > Authors who are only testing on modern desktops will, as you say, likely > ignore this issue. ?I therefore fully expect that they will never set this > attribute. Isn't that like saying that authors who are only testing on normal browsers will likely ignore the longdesc= attribute? It seems like most authors do just ignore it, but the ones who don't get it wrong far more often than they get it right. In the ~0.1% of images where longdesc= is used, it's misused literally over 99% of the time: http://blog.whatwg.org/the-longdesc-lottery It thus ends up being so useless for users that even if you do provide a good longdesc, no one will actually use it. There's so little signal and so much noise that screenreader users just don't bother checking it, if they even know that it exists. It thus seems like it would be prudent to wait on implementation experience to see if a new attribute is actually needed here. Adding attributes that don't affect most users is a recipe for widespread misuse. In the worst case, browsers might very well refuse to support the attribute because it's come into wide misuse before any browser actually supports it, so supporting it breaks sites. (I'm pretty sure there are examples of this happening, although I can't think of any offhand.)
Received on Monday, 18 May 2009 15:52:03 UTC