Re: [html4all] several messages about alt

On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 1:33 AM, Leif Halvard Silli <lhs@malform.no> wrote:

> Those are different evaluation axes. But experience has shown us that the
> only validation that authors care about is the general CSS and HTML stamps.
> Therefore, we must (continue to) incorporate social consciousness into the
> general stamping tools.

...
>
> The way I propose it, with some kind of "unready" stamp etc, people will
> be allowed to cheat - just remove the 'unready' and do the minimum thing
> with the alt attribtues -  but they will also then know that they are
> cheating. At the same time, what is cheating? The author evalution always
> counts.
>


As you say, most people generally only care about getting the tick of
approval, or in this case, validator images. This unready stamp reminds me a
lot of the transitional doctypes. The transitional doctypes too were meant
to be used by a small segment of the web that were unable to completely
fulfil the proper spec (ie, strict). In the case of the transitional
doctypes those pages were flawed using presentational markup rather than
inaccessible markup, but I think it should still be a warning.

Because the transitional doctypes were not used as intended.

For an unready stamp to be successful I think all of the following would
need to be ensured. Can you provide any evidence they would be?
1. It really would have to be used by only a small number of pages
2. The public would have to continue seeing it as undesirable, rather than
accepting and even preferring it to the full spec. Even if the validators
gave warnings or errors those might soon be regarded as flaws of the
validator... for example, does anyone actually pay attention to the CSS
validator messages about not providing both fore and background colours?
3. People would actually need to work actively to fix pages with the stamp.
4. That the stamp wouldn't be used in more cases than intended. Yes it's
intended for CMS', but what's to stop it being used on any pages where the
author is too lazy to add alt attributes?