- From: Jason White <jason@jasonjgw.net>
- Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2007 21:47:12 +1100
- To: wai-xtech@w3.org
On Thu, Nov 29, 2007 at 10:48:53AM +0100, Charles McCathieNevile wrote: > I think we should be clearer. > > [[[ If an image is a key part of the content, the alt attribute > must not be specified with an empty value. ]]] > > Is very important. I think we should request that a missing alt value be > considered invalid, although for accessibility reasons it is preferred to > the more serious error of marking meaningful content which requires an > alternative with alt="" I support Charles' comments. Furthermore, the most important concept is that there should be only two syntactically distinct possibilities: 1. Alt with a non-null string, providing an alternative to the image. 2. Alt with a null string, signifying that the image is an artifact of formatting. There should not be a third - an omitted alt - which ought, as Charles suggests, to trigger a syntax error that can be detected by authoring tools and markup validators. HTML generating applications (including authoring tools) should not output alt="" unless reasonable measures have been taken to ensure that the image belongs to the decorative class. This last point is an authoring tool requirement which I am sure can be handled in ATAG, if it is not there already.
Received on Thursday, 29 November 2007 10:47:36 UTC