- From: Charles McCathieNevile <charles@w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 7 Dec 1999 19:14:23 -0500 (EST)
- To: Wendy A Chisholm <wendy@w3.org>
- cc: w3c-wai-gl@w3.org, w3c-wai-er-ig@w3.org
I tested the page with Amaya release 2.1 running on Linux 2.2 (RedHat 6.1 and Gnome) and got nothing rendered each time (in the alternate view). I got the same results running Lynx 2.8 on linux as were on windows. Netscape 4.6 in linux gave me the same as your results for MSIE I agree that the behaviour does not seem completely specified for alt="" or alt=" ". Actually, why not use an object element instead (or use XHTML and namespaces to include SVG...) Charles McCN On Tue, 7 Dec 1999, Wendy A Chisholm wrote: >3b. THere is no defined handling for alt=" ", so it might no have the desired >effect using "" versus " " has been argued back and forth. It is my interpretation of sifting through the archives that if the "desired effect" is a space between two characters, using an image for this is inappropriate. We suggest style sheets. Also, some people have favored "" while others like " ". Most of the arguments have been based on the current state of the art handling of spaces. However, it appears that "" and " " are currently handled the same [http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/tests/spaces.html]. I was the only one to respond to the tests, so it only includes the 3 browsers I was able to test. Many people pointed to the HTML4 spec where it says that "leading or trailing spaces" may be ignored. However, is a single space trailing or leading? is inappropriate since it is intended to be used as a typesetting hint as Nir described on 17 November: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-gl/1999OctDec/0070.html Alan Flavell also makes a good point about nbsp not being considered "white space" http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-gl/1999OctDec/0069.html Therefore, I don't think it matters much if we suggest that people use "" or " ". Personally, it seems to be a matter of author preference. Neither one is going to cause horrible things to happen (although "" has historically - i.e. it supposedly used to be ignored by Lynx but doesn't seem to be anymore). If we look at the long term, I would suggest using a space since spaces are supposed to be preserved in XML. However, I also agree that it is a matter of separating content from presentation. A space seems to say, "there is formatting going on here" while null says, "it's decorative." Again, I think it boils down to author preference.
Received on Tuesday, 7 December 1999 19:14:24 UTC