RE: WA - background-image in CSS

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> no BUT all of the same information should be avaliable on all
> browsers.  

Could people perhaps be defining "content" and "information"
differently.

If I have a picture of a elder tree on a page then there are
different levels at which someone with the same abilities, cultural
background, and religious background as myself receive information.

1. They have been sent a stream of bytes. They can manipulate those
bytes, save them, republish them, etc.
2. They know the tree is green.
3. They know it is a tree.
4. They know it is a an elder.
5. The image is of a natural rather than artificial thing.
5a. The tree is sacred to the goddess and beloved of the Sidhe.
6a. It is taboo to burn the tree or to take a cutting other than on
Beltane.
7a. It is bad luck to make a child's crib out of it.
5b. It is a source of elderflower and elderberries, which are both
edible.

There are many other pieces of information that are available from
the same jpeg image, depending on context and the ability of the user
to work with that context. There may be other pieces of information
that I as an author am not aware of that others can take from it.

In one particular use I could only have meant the first of these
pieces of information, i.e. I have a resource of images of trees for
people to download and use. If they aren't using a graphical browser
I can still let them know that they can download the image and they
can manipulate it using a separate graphics editor, pass it on to a
colleague or whatever (incidentally this *is* a case where "image"
make sense in an alt attribute).

If I want to impart datum 7a to the user I can do this easily with a
co-religious even if they can't see the tree. I need to do
considerably more work to impart this information to someone of a
different faith and ethnic background who can see the image.

How the image should be marked up depends on which I am doing. In the
first case I need to tell you what the image is of. If it links to a
larger image I should probably tell you about it's size in pixels and
in bytes. In the second case I don't need to tell you anything about
the image itself at all. Would I be discriminating against you in not
telling you?

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Received on Friday, 18 January 2002 10:15:39 UTC