- From: Alan J. Flavell <flavell@a5.ph.gla.ac.uk>
- Date: Thu, 11 Nov 1999 14:09:13 +0000 (GMT)
- To: Charles McCathieNevile <charles@w3.org>
- cc: WAI Guidelines List <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
On Wed, 10 Nov 1999, 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. Well, there's a lot that one doesn't know about how HTML will be rendered, and that is one of its strengths. I'd say we have a clear idea of what is meant by 'foo bar', even if there are limits to what we know about how it will be rendered. And we know that because is not classified as white space[1], the rules concerning the suppression of leading and/or trailing white space do not apply to it. It would seem to me that foo<IMG SRC=.. ALT=" ">bar, from the point of a text browser, is equivalent to foo bar, and as such it is distinctively different from the otherwise similar construct where ALT="". And would, one hopes, be indexed differently. [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/text.html#h-9.1 > The specification explicitly > says leading/trailing whitespace in attributes will be ignored, Indeed, but nbsp is not white space. (and earlier in the thread) > What user agents ignore the space character in ALT=" "? I honestly don't know, also I'm not sure whether an isolated white space counts as leading or trailing or neither. I've used ALT=" " before, but in view of the uncertainty about this point, I'd be willing (in appropriate situations) to use no-break space instead, without a qualm. I'm _not_ talking about formatting as such, but about maintaining a separation between two text tokens separated by nothing but an image (say for example a logo), that would otherwise in a text-mode browser get run together and thus misinterpreted as a single word. Hope this is useful.
Received on Thursday, 11 November 1999 09:09:15 UTC