Re: Need some help

to follow up on what Daniel Dardailler said:

> [quoting Jason White]
> > image is made.. I have sometimes wondered whether, by making the kind of
> > modification to HTTP that Al has suggested, one would be inadvertently
> > sending a signal to content providers that they do not need to be diligent
> > in ensuring that the alt attribute is used, since the HTTP change will
> > serve as a fall-back mechanism that text-based clients can rely upon in
> > any case.
> 
> I'm with you, but on a purely OO basis, it's good to have the
> description of the data (here an image) stored with the image, and
> retrieved from the same source. Maybe this is all too theorical and
> ALT and ALTSRC is all we need.
>  

The distinction you raise is very important, in practical terms.
It is not so much where the description is physically stored as
how it is logically accessed.  A description which is of the
image itself, innocent of any use of the image, should be
accessible by the client software without any extra manual effort
on the part of the HTML author using the image in an HTML page.
An anchor defines a use of the image.  It should not have to
redundantly refer to the image and the description of the image.
If the HTML author wants to support alternative content in an
anchor, depending on some factors in the context of the use of
that HTML file, that is another matter.  We need that and we
need it to be more pervasive and capable.

What we see today is this

   - many ALT attributes are absent
   - most of those that are populated are loaded with
   a context-independent description of the image.
   Sometimes this is appropriate, sometimes not.
   - very few are populated with the highest and best
   text to use in the context of a text-mode browse of
   the page.

To get to a solution we can enforce, we need a better solution
than ALT.  To tide us over until the necessary infrastructure is
all in place, we need to tell people to use context-aware ALT
strings.

--
Al Gilman

Received on Wednesday, 9 July 1997 14:31:49 UTC