Re: Mandatory and Important

Hi, Laura-

Laura Carlson wrote (on 8/21/08 2:13 PM):
> 
> In the thread, "Optional But Important (was: alt attribute - a very
> simple proposal)" [1] you wrote:
> 
>> It's really important for @alt to be included when it's appropriate,
>> but a "required" attribute connotes that an element cannot be
>> minimally and usefully processed without that attribute.  So, my
>> opinion is that @alt should not be required for validity or
>> well-formedness.
...
> It's the elephant in the room. And until someone either comes up with
> a solution that maintains the integrity of the markup while addressing
> their business needs, or addresses putting the business requirements
> above the integrity of the markup, everyone is wasting time arguing
> about edge cases.

You quoted me, but left out the most important part of my email: the
proposal.  I'll include it here for this thread:

[[
However, @alt (and maybe some other attributes and elements) is so
important that it might be useful if there were a third class of
conformance: well-formedness, validity, and "semantic completeness".
So, an image without @alt would be well-formed, valid, but perhaps not
semantically complete.
]]

So, you see, I'm not saying that @alt should not be flagged in a
validator.  Rather, I'm suggesting that it be flagged as something
*other than* a validity or well-formedness error.

It seems disingenuous to suggest that I stated otherwise, or that I was
trying to obfuscate the issue.  Also, please don't categorize my
suggestion as being for anything other than the benefit of accessibility
(such as business cases or profit), as it was very clearly intended
explicitly for the sole purpose of a validator explaining not only what
the problem with such a document would be, but the rationale for
flagging the problem.


(As a side note, please stop including my email in the CC list for this
thread.  I honestly don't need 4 copies of each email.  When you feel
the need to draw someone's attention to an email to a list, it's
sufficient to use BCC so they don't get perma-added to the thread.)

Regards-
-Doug

Received on Friday, 22 August 2008 21:26:12 UTC