Re: null alt revisited

KB: Actually from a purely informational point of view, the former
[something_unhelpful.gif] contains more POTENTIALLY useful
information than either " " or [IMAGE].

Sure, but as Mike pointed out, implicitly, you don't have to listen to it.
The probability is about .005 that anything useful can be gleaned from the
url of a gif - actually I think the probability is 0. No user should be
subjected to that. For HPR, I argued (fought) against the "image" as an
option for images without alt-text or title, for the same reason; not
useful. Also I think user agent developers must make decisions, and not
leave the user with 467 settings. The settings course is too often taken
here.

Jim Thatcher
IBM Special Needs Systems
www.ibm.com/sns
thatch@us.ibm.com
(512)838-0432



Kynn Bartlett <kynn-hwg@idyllmtn.com> on 04/08/99 01:23:33 PM

To:   Charles McCathieNevile <charles@w3.org>
cc:   "w3c-wai-au@w3.org" <w3c-wai-au@w3.org> (bcc: James
      Thatcher/Austin/IBM)
Subject:  Re: null alt revisited





At 01:45 p.m. 04/08/99 -0400, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
>Oh, maybe so. seems these days I get lots of [something_unhelpful.gif] but
>not much [IMAGE]

Actually from a purely informational point of view, the former
[something_unhelpful.gif] contains more POTENTIALLY useful
information than either " " or [IMAGE].  Now, you and I know
that they it SUCKS as ALT text, and nobody should ever use it,
but looking at it practically, there is at least the potential
for some useful info to be conveyed by the filename, and none
by the simple [IMAGE] substitution.

I would 1000% times more desire to see LEGITIMATE, well-written
alternative text, but when given the choice of three evils, my
prefs would run [filename.gif] [IMAGE] " ".

--
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@hwg.org>
President, Governing Board Member
HTML Writers Guild <URL:http://www.hwg.org>

Received on Thursday, 8 April 1999 23:21:22 UTC