Re: Propose removing "An image in an e-mail or document intended for a specific person who is known to be able to view images" from the HTML5 spec.

Le 13 avr. 2008 à 13:13, Ben Boyle a écrit :
> Well, this goes to the heart of the matter: what is the purpose of
> "conformance"?

Interesting question, but not a simple answer…

> I assume it is one measure of quality, a pass/fail assessment of
> whether a HTML document 'conforms' to a set of base quality criteria.
> It's hugely useful when publishing to a wide audience.

* There is the document (1) which contains two type of informations:  
The content and the instructions around this content.
* There is the authoring tool which helped me write parts of this  
document.
* There is the user agent which renders/interprets this document.
* There is the person who authored the document.

That is at least 4 levels of conformance which different priorities.

Ian Hickson said:

Le 13 avr. 2008 à 05:00, Ian Hickson a écrit :
> What possible benefit is there to making that e-mail non-conforming?

There are benefits of having the e-mail accessible and rich for  
whatever reasons the recipients of this email wish.

> (There's no way that my partner will describe the image textually, I
> assure you.)

That's another side of the issue, which is not about the document  
itself, but about the authoring tool. HTML in email has always been  
for poor authoring practices of html content (I will not digress on  
the reason.)

So the rules for me are more on the side of:

* an authoring tool MUST produce a document with
   some (to be defined in this case) requirements.
   It could be "alt" attribute or something else
   considered more convenient.
* a document is conformant if it contains the reliable
   mechanism that helps a user agent to interpret it.


"alt" attribute has been traditionally challenging for authoring tools  
developers, specifically in case like HTML email or photo web  
services. Are there better mechanisms that could be used for creating  
an editing-consumption paradigm which would be easier? (role  
attribute, visual information in the page, etc.) Would it be  
worthwhile to create a solution which would be more effective?

(1) The final construction of whatever has been sent to the user agent.

-- 
Karl Dubost - W3C
http://www.w3.org/QA/
Be Strict To Be Cool

Received on Monday, 14 April 2008 00:58:40 UTC