Re: GL's interpretation of null alt-text

At 06:32 PM 11/10/99 -0500, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
>I agree with you that there is no particular problem in using  , except
>that you don't know how it will be rendered. The specification _explicitly_
>says leading/trailing whitespace in attributes _will_ be ignored, 
[emphasis added -Al]

I couldn't find where it says that.  What I found was in 

Basic HTML data types

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/types.html#type-cdata

and it says:

     * CDATA is a sequence of characters from the document character set
       and may include character entities. User agents should interpret
       attribute values as follows:
          + Replace character entities with characters,
          + Ignore line feeds,
          + Replace each carriage return or tab with a single space.
       User agents may ignore leading and trailing white space in CDATA
       attribute values (e.g., "   myval   " may be interpreted as
       "myval"). Authors should not declare attribute values with leading
       or trailing white space.

Is this the specification statement you are referring to?

This is simply a warning that one should not declare 
quote space s t u f f endquote 
and 
quote s t u f f endquote
as two different enumeration values in the same type, because browsers
cannot be trusted to distinguish those two strings. 

It is not clear from this discussion whether a singleton blank character
even qualifies as leading or training whitespace.  That is not the normal
sense of the term, where it refers to non-printing characters preceding or
following printing characters.

What browser does bad things with ALT=" ", and just what does it do?

Al

                                                                   so
relying on
>it breaks even the "be strict in what you send but tolerant in what you
>accept" model.
>
>Charles McCN
>
>On Wed, 10 Nov 1999, Al Gilman wrote:
>
>[snip]  
>  To recap in brief,
>  
>  What user agents ignore the space character in ALT=" "?  What do they do?
>  
>  What access impairment is caused by the use of ALT=" " on a spacer
>  image used inline between otherwise un-separated text content?  How should
>  one mark this up otherwise if not ALT=" "?
>  
>  Unless someone can answer those questions better, 
>  I would like to dissent on points 1. and 2.
>  
>  Al
>  
>

Received on Wednesday, 10 November 1999 22:09:36 UTC