- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2008 01:18:38 +0000 (UTC)
- To: Jim Jewett <jimjjewett@gmail.com>
- Cc: foliot@wats.ca, wai-xtech@w3.org, wai-liaison@w3.org, public-html@w3.org, list@html4all.org
On Tue, 15 Apr 2008, Jim Jewett wrote: > > Ian's point was that people won't really supply an alt -- even John > Foliot seemed to have forgotten. > > John's point was that he didn't forget -- the tool didn't *allow* him to > enter an alt. Taking out the alt requirement will remove any pressure > on flikr to fix this. On the other hand, > > (1) if flikr had to publish "alt=_notsupplied" to claim validity, that > might annoy the coders enough that they would create at least an > optional way to supply alt text. > > And this leads in to the main reasons why "alt=_magicvalue" is different > from an omitted alt. > > (2) There are already tons of pages (including this one) which > (wrongly) use alt="", and tons of other pages that (wrongly, for now) > omit the alt. There always will be, because these are good > programmer-language defaults. > > There are not many pages saying "alt=_decorative" or "alt=_notsupplied", > and those values aren't likely to be supplied by accident -- so they > have a chance of remaining honest. This is the only good argument I have seen for why we should make the alt attribute a required attribute. I did consider this, however -- it has been suggested several times in the past. The problem is that I am skeptical that magic keywords won't be abused as much as the simpler syntax we have now. If anything, the longdesc="" attribute should show us how much authors are likely to use nonsense values. longdesc="" is supposed to take a URI, but a huge fraction of longdesc="" attributes have strings that are not URIs at all. (The most common longdesc="" value is the empty string!) If we had reason to believe that these new magic values wouldn't be abused as much as the current proposal, then I'd agree. However, I think that that would be naive. (Also, the _decorative value, if we made it required instead of alt="", would also make a large amount of existing content non-conforming, since people use alt="" today. But if we allowed both, then we'd lose the benefit of _decorative.) > (3) There could be more than one (or even two) magic tokens. When I'm > browsing without images, I often want to make a special request for the > critical images. I wouldn't grab _decorative. I wouldn't grab most > images with a good alt. I wouldn't want to grab images that are just a > "better" representation of the summary/description/caption. > > I would want to grab the main content. __notsupplied tells me that > (unless the CMS is really lousy) the image is something a user supplied > specific to this page. In this case, that would be the main image and > the teaser from the slideshow -- and two is less than the number of > images without an alt, according to someone else's count. Flickr currently abuses alt all over the place. I have no confidence that they would use these new values correctly. -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Wednesday, 16 April 2008 01:19:28 UTC