- From: Jukka Korpela <jkorpela@cc.hut.fi>
- Date: Wed, 10 Sep 1997 09:02:15 +0300 (EET DST)
- To: www-html@w3.org
On Tue, 9 Sep 1997, Liam Quinn wrote: > I was glancing over the recently updated Cougar DTD at > <http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Cougar/Cougar.dtd> where I noticed that the ALT > attribute for IMG is now a required attribute (a good thing, IMO). A good thing indeed, although it is somewhat odd to improve elements which should actually be deprecated (as IMG should be, in favor of OBJECT). > Both of these comments imply that > the ALT attribute is used to give a *description* of the image, but > commonly suggested practice (as well as the HTML 4.0 draft [1]) says that > the ALT attribute should be used to give *alternate text* I remember reading somewhere in the draft an explicit statement which says that comments in the DTD have no normative value. I think they should be compatible with the normative part, however. > With this in mind, I would suggest changing the DTD's comment to > "alternate text when image is not rendered". The essential thing is the wording of the specification itself. If it is difficult to make the comments in the DTD correspond to that, such comments should be simply removed. However, the ALT controversy is not just a matter of wording. There is a fundamental problem. There are two masters to serve, two needs: the need for replacement (when image is not shown at all, for some reason) and the need for description. The latter is nowadays more common, as many people use graphic browsers with image autoloading off. But both needs must be taken into account. I'm not sure exactly how this should be done for the IMG element, but I think the essential point is to prevent the controversy from ever arising for the OBJECT element. For my preliminary thoughts on this, see http://www.hut.fi/home/jkorpela/HTML4.0/comments.html#alt Yucca, http://www.hut.fi/home/jkorpela/
Received on Wednesday, 10 September 1997 02:02:19 UTC