- From: Joshue O Connor <joshue.oconnor@cfit.ie>
- Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2008 22:44:54 +0100
- To: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Cc: John Foliot <foliot@wats.ca>, 'Tomas Caspers' <tomas@tomascaspers.de>, wai-xtech@w3.org, wai-liaison@w3.org, public-html@w3.org, 'HTML4All' <list@html4all.org>
Ian Hickson wrote: > There is *absolutely no practical difference* to the UA between omitting > the alt="" attribute altogether, and having the alt="" attribute set to > some magical reserved value. They are functionally identical, and user > agents can get as much information from either. Thats not entirely true. If you consider a UA like a screen reader which will pretty much by default skip images that have a null alt value and the other situation you cite where there is some reserved value that will potentially trigger some kind of behaviour (which is undefined as yet). The difference (an benefit) of this magical reserved value is that the user may be able to choose to also ignore it via some verbosity settings. Without this 'magical reserved value' the screen reader will potentially default into heuristic evaluation which is not desirable when interacting with an application - such as the much vaunted photo sharing application - and its dynamically generated/random alphanumeric URLs. [1] So while in principle there may be no practical difference to the UA, and I see your point, there is potential for a very real impact on the user. Cheers Josh [1] http://www.paciellogroup.com/resources/articles/altinhtml5.html#apply1
Received on Tuesday, 15 April 2008 21:45:40 UTC