Re: testing versus expert opinion

On Tue, 11 Sep 2007 14:02:18 +0200, Steve Faulkner  
<sfaulkner@paciellogroup.com> wrote:
>> The alt= attribute is a known open issue.
>
> It would be good if it has that status, that it be recorded as such in  
> the spec. To date I have seen nothing from the editors of the spec to  
> indicate this (either in the spec, on the html wg list or on IRC).

I agree this would be nice. As has been stated before on public-html  
volunteers are needed to make it easy to mark up open issues in the  
specification. I believe Simon Pieters has done some work there recently,  
but I'm not sure where it ended up.


> I do think that making such contraversial changes to the spec without  
> debate and research does create an atmosphere in which adversarial  
> exchanges
> flourish.

It's a draft. Until recently the draft didn't say much about <img> at all.  
Now it contains an idea from the editor on how alt= can be handled  
including lots of detailed examples on how to write good alt text. This  
seems like a good thing. Apparently one of the changes has a negative  
impact on (some) assistive technology. This has been pointed out on the  
HTML WG mailing list and several weblogs. I'd assume that whenever the  
editor is going to look at feedback for the alt= attribute again he'll  
take all that into account. This is how the editing process is functioning  
and it works pretty well as progress is made quite fast.

(FWIW, there are a lot of ideas in the draft there's no real agreement  
about yet. I'd assume lots of the things in there are controversial for  
Microsoft for instance. These are all issues that will be dealt with in  
one way or another in an open way and nobody will be ignored. (As you  
might recall, it were mostly the WHATWG contributers actively pushing  
people (through their weblogs) to join the HTML WG so they can give  
feedback.))


-- 
Anne van Kesteren
<http://annevankesteren.nl/>
<http://www.opera.com/>

Received on Tuesday, 11 September 2007 12:14:52 UTC