Desc and Alt

Jason and myself have been looking at the issue Al calls "Text
descriptions and alternatives for images" in his HC-plan page
(http://www.access.digex.net/%7Easgilman/web-access/HC-plan.html).


Reviewing
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Group/9709/WD-html40-970919/struct/objects.html#h-14.2

made us realize that Dave had already been improving the spec.

In particular, it does take care of the wording concern (not being
explicit enough about the use in non-graphical environments) Jason
raised a while ago.

We think we still need to add of something like:

 In order to allow arbitrary anchor (such as long textual description)
 in the OBJECT shapes content, OBJECT should only looks for <A> that
 have a "coords" attributes and ignore the others when building the
 image map.

Even though we think this will be the case by default: no coord = no
relevance for the image map and therefore no use.


We think the MAP extension is not to be pursued, as it's not backward
compatible for old browsers and would require the use of hacky comment
techniques to gain support.


We think we should ask the LONGDESC for IMG, the reasoning
being that it's simpler to implement than OBJECT and so we should see
implementation in Lynx/WebSpeak/Emacs sooner than expected and the
benefit of the functionatily present for users.


We do want FRAME to get a real TITLE attribute and a LONGDESC too, the
reasonning being that FRAME becomes equivalent to IMG in that
situation (result in inlining the image).


Additionally, we think the note on generating ALT text automatically:

http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Group/9709/WD-html40-970919/appendix/notes.html#altgen

should be improved to say that some prefix will be added to the
generated alt text when the author is not responsible for it, so that
the user know what quality to expect.

We also think this section should be moved in the Browser guideline
book, not in the HTML spec.

Received on Thursday, 9 October 1997 10:28:31 UTC