- From: Michael[tm] Smith <mike@w3.org>
- Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2012 01:53:08 +0900
- To: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
- Cc: WHATWG <whatwg@whatwg.org>
Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>, 2012-08-05 15:52 +0300: > While I agree with the sentiment the name of the attribute > communicates, its length is enough of a problem to probably make it > fail: > 1) Like a namespace URL, it's too long to memorize correctly, so it's > easier for the generator developer to type 'alt' than to copy and past > the long attribute name from somewhere. C'mon man. The generator developer adds the attribute name to his or her code exactly once. In that scenario, what relevance does the length of the attribute name have at all? It could just be some opaque string for all they care. > 2) It takes so many more bytes than alt="", so it's easy to shy away > from using it on imagined efficiency grounds. Only for pathologicals. I don't think the people who are obsessed with efficiency to that degree actually develop tools that other people use. I think people who do develop usefl tools generally understand that there are a lot of tradeoffs, and efficiency doesn't trump everything else in the decisions they make. Anyway, do you have a concrete suggestion for an alternate name? I'm not wedded to "generator-unable-to-provide-required-alt" and I doubt Hixie is either. It's just a proposal that came up after 15 minutes of brainstorming on IRC. That said, Hixie's already articulated the reasons behind the choice of that name. Lacking any other proposed alternative, it's hard to have any kind of productive discussion about the name. --Mike -- Michael[tm] Smith http://people.w3.org/mike
Received on Tuesday, 7 August 2012 16:53:39 UTC