Re: longdesc spec text

Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis, Mon, 2 May 2011 15:06:56 +0100:
> On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 12:41 PM, Laura Carlson:

>> Did you get that impression from Henri? He said that it would be
>> trivial to add some checks.
> 
> But he also said:
> 
>> I think making machine-checkable conformance a property of the HTML file
>> (and the protocol headers it was supplied with) makes the concept more
>> tractable than making machine-checkable conformance depend on the
>> external resources the HTML file refers to. That's why if longdesc were
>> reinstated, I wouldn't want to make its machine-checkable conformance
>> depend on external resources. However, if we find a that other features
>> have extremely compelling reasons to have their machine-checkable
>> conformance depend on external resources, then we might as well make the
>> machine-checkable conformance of longdesc depend on external resources,
>> too.
> 
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2011Mar/0723.html
> 
> Laura continued:
>> Someone proposed this text to me:
>> "Conformance checkers and authoring tools should inspect the
>> description resource URI and issue a warning if the URI cannot
>> reference a text description of the image (i.e., if the URI is empty
>> or otherwise invalid, if the URI reference has a mime type other than
>> text/*)"
> 
> All these checks involve downloading external resources, which is what
> Henri is trying to avoid above.

Validator.nu's Image report does download images. So it could be part 
of an image report/checker.

>> Leif has proposed requiring longdesc URLS to have #fragment so that
>> they could be more machine checkable. It would make it more complex
>> for humans but tools could catch more errors. What do you think?
> 
> I don't think making things more complex for authors is a good idea.

I don't agree it makes things more complex for authors. 
-- 
leif halvard silli

Received on Monday, 2 May 2011 14:17:15 UTC