Re: ALT tools (was: Censorship by laziness)

Hello Larry, and thanks for your honest feedback.

> Putting warning (if not error) 
> messages in web authoring tools seems like a more productive path to work on.  

I agree. Prevention is always better than cure. But until we eradicate
the disease, we need both. This system is about a cure for Web sites
that never add ALT to their image.

The "complaint server" aspect is not to be under-estimated too and I
think the reporting part might help to force webmaster into adding
their own ALT.

> I would warn against putting alot of development time into this centralized
> tagging concept where there seems to be so many tougher development tasks
> at hand. 

To be frank, I haven't really thought about where, when and by who
this kind of system will be implemented, in other words, there is no
real project behind it, just a concept that I wanted to share with the
community.

With respect to other development at hand: we're not in an either/or
situation. We're talking different kind of resources in fact. Having a
given authoring tool vendor to upgrade his browser to our guidelines
is a "persuasion" job, where implementing an Alt-server could be a
summer internship programming job.

Regarding feasability/scalability.
A couple of years ago, a guy at Digital (a former INRIA researcher :-)
said he could build a system that would index the whole Internet and
provide a free full-text search interface to the public.

Since the day Altavista went live, I've changed my mind regarding what
is and what is not possible on the Web (and today, Altavista is doing
live translation, which seems at least as complex as OCR stuff).

Received on Friday, 23 January 1998 15:12:00 UTC