- From: Dave Singer <singer@apple.com>
- Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2008 12:24:41 -0700
- To: John Foliot <foliot@wats.ca>
- Cc: 'HTML4All' <list@html4all.org>, wai-xtech@w3.org, 'HTML WG' <public-html@w3.org>
At 12:09 -0700 11/04/08, John Foliot wrote: >(Slightly trimmed list to reduce overload) > >Julian Reschke wrote: >> >> In general, requiring values for things that can't always be provided >> is a bad idea. It always leads to authors making up values, which >> makes the situation *worse* for the people depending on it. > >You know, I've heard this opinion expressed numerous times, but have yet to >see any evidence at all to substantiate this claim. Please explain in >normative and technical terms how this is "worse", else remove the claim >from the discussion. Consider an image that is 'part of the content' <img ... alt="an image"> tells the user agent that there is a useful alt string that is worth displaying to the user, which is a lie (the string provided is not useful), and <img ... alt=""> tells the user-agent that the image is not 'part of the content', it's not worth describing, which in this hypothetical case is also a lie, whereas <img ... > tells the user agent the truth, that there is not a useful author-provided string. Lies are "worse" than the truth. -- David Singer Apple/QuickTime
Received on Friday, 11 April 2008 19:26:21 UTC