RE: The alt="" attribute

On Tue, 26 Aug 2008, John Foliot wrote:
> 
> The second comment concerns the alternative delivery methods proposed: 
> you cite @title, <legend> or heading as being the carriers that provide 
> the contextual information.  I would suggest that @longdesc also be 
> included in that list (the usefulness of @longdesc not yet being 
> disproven ) as well as @caption, and I am curious why other methods 
> (such as perhaps @role, or the ARIA labeledby/describedby) could not 
> also be added to the list - providing as many options as possible to 
> content authors allows for a more granular solution and makes it 
> "easier" for content authors to be conformant - clearly a stated goal 
> for HTML5.

The ARIA features are actually included in the list in a comment right 
now, I'm waiting for the ARIA spec to be better defined before going 
further with that. I don't think <caption> makes sense in this context, 
since it is explicitly captioning the table and not the image, but it has 
been suggested that maybe appropriate table headers could be used, and I 
will be looking at that shortly. longdesc="" would definitely be added to 
this list if it were in the draft; its presence is another issue that I 
will deal with separately. Another idea was <fieldset> <legend>, which I 
will also be looking at.

Cheers,
-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'