- From: Christophe Strobbe <christophe.strobbe@esat.kuleuven.be>
- Date: Mon, 10 Apr 2006 16:12:13 +0200
- To: <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Hi, Gregg Vanderheiden wrote: <quote> Hi Gez, Andrew, Johannes, Sorry First - yes I meant " " (I have been typing in the WIKI too long) Second - let me rephrase the question better. Our technique currently says ALT="" is preferred ALT=" " is acceptable but not preferred ALT=" " is not. Michael said "why is " " not acceptable if " " is acceptable. I think we were trying to reduce the number of options but allow ALT=" " due to past and current Web content. And might be easier to get some GUI tools to actually put the ALT attribute in. (having some content causes it to be added). (and I think we may even have told people to use ALT=" " at some point.) So the question is Should we also allow " " ? Gez - were you saying 'yes'? Johannes, Andrew, John, I logged your answers as being 'no'. Do we want to continue to allow " " to make it easy to force tools to put the ALT in without people having to know how to hand doctor their code? (Hopefully - all tools will have a means for forcing a null ALT="" someday.) </quote> A non-breaking space is written as an entity reference ( or  ) because keyboards don't have a key for it. When markup goes through some processing, however, it is possible that the entity reference is converted into the actual non-breaking space, which looks just like a normal space in the source code. Conversely, it is possible to enter a normal space by means of an entity reference ( ), but we don't do that because it's a waste of time. Why is the normal space treated differently from the non-breaking space (and other kinds of spaces, such as en space (  or  ), em space (  or  ), etc.)? It seems more consistent to treat all types of spaces the same: either all are allowed, or none are allowed. I would not advocate normal spaces in so-called "null" alt attributes, because then you would have to allow other types of spaces, too. Regards, Christophe -- Christophe Strobbe K.U.Leuven - Departement of Electrical Engineering - Research Group on Document Architectures Kasteelpark Arenberg 10 - 3001 Leuven-Heverlee - BELGIUM tel: +32 16 32 85 51 http://www.docarch.be/ Disclaimer: http://www.kuleuven.be/cwis/email_disclaimer.htm
Received on Monday, 10 April 2006 14:12:36 UTC