Re: Bug report and ideas

On Tue, 20 Mar 2001 noog@libero.it wrote:

  What about auto-generate an alt text? such as the image's name without the
  .gif extension?

That would contravene the W3C Recommendation "Authoring Tool Accessibility
Guidelines" http://www.w3.org/TR/ATAG10 and would produce the sort of rubbish
pages that litter the web today.
"[spacer][spacer][spacer][spacer][l_t_ang][h_pg][spacer][spacer]" is hardly
useful content compared to "Home".

  or the image's software text chunk? (this could be really an
  idea)

Yes, that is a technique that is suggested by the guidelines.

  Show the warning during validation, NOT during editing. Or show it in the
  status bar, just like Homesite does (I believe you have a lot to learn from
  Allaire - not the memory management for sure :), so the user can continue
  his/her work without interruption

Workflow differences are what distinguish tools that actually generate decent
code to start with.

  Anyway that message is plain stupid. I used to use gif images to create
  round corners for tables and other merely cosmetic artifacts, and to enforce
  table layout as well (we really need a true layout grid), why the heck
  should a 3x3 pixel round corner have an alt text? is it supposed to?

Why would you need a layout grid of fixed size? There aren't the browsers
out there with fixed sizes to support it, by and large. You just end up with
a page that doesn't fit most browsers very well.

  Be practical: people don't use <table>'s to show tabular data, people don't
  use gif images to express deep concepts or add content to a page

Yes, people do. People also use them for stylistic effects (why? If you only
care about a handful of users with recent browsers they have CSS support. If
you care about the handful that don't then it is likely the users aren't
interested enough in layout support to either upgrade or justify the work you
do for them).

  > I'd even suggest that, with a check box, it should still
  > generate a warning, explaining why alt text was needed, and
  > defaulted to not accepting the change.

I would like to see an option for null alt text as a checkbox on the dialog
in Amaya. Not having any alt attribute is not valid for any HTML
specification released since 1997. Since one of the goals of Amaya is to
support W3C specifications it doesn't make sense to produce non-valid code -
there are plenty of products out there to do that for you.

just my .02 <currency>

Charles McCN

Received on Tuesday, 20 March 2001 07:26:54 UTC