[Suggestion] New IMG attributes

Dear W3C,
Firstly, I would like to apologize in advance, since English isn't my first language.
You probably know about Google Reverse Image Search, when you upload an image to search the source. If the image isn't too popular, the search engine should link the source in the first results. However, there is a serious problem if the image is uploaded multiple time and not credited. Even though that's illegal, it's rather common to see stolen images. I think some websites don't take this issue seriously, but there are also some ways to help this.
That's how I came up with the idea of attributes like those: artist, original and source. I hope this would help Google Images to distinguish a stolen image from an original one.

artist is self-explanatory. You would be able to credit the artist with their username or real name.

Example:<img src="my_image.jpg" alt="image" artist="John Doe">


original would show if the image uploaded is the original. For image uploading website, a checkbox like "By checking this, I swear that I'm the original creator/artist of this image or [whatever laws applies to it] and your account will be suspended" would force an user to make the right choice.

Example:<img src="my_image.jpg" alt="image" original> <!-- original art uploaded, indexed by Google -->
<img src="my_image.jpg" alt="image">          <!-- non-original art, partially ignored by Google (see "source") -->


source would be a little harder to execute. It would lead to the source of the original creation. If a website has the option to share (via a "share on Facebook, Twitter, etc" button) the image on a social media, most of the time, the image would be surrounded by an anchor. But having an attribute in the img tag would be more impactful, in my opinion. The more an image found on Google has a common source, the better it would be indexed. (Also, since src means source, don't hesitate to use another word!)

Example:<a href="https://example.com/image_source.jpg">    <img src="my_image.jpg" alt="image" source="https://example.com/image_source.jpg"></a>

If an image doesn't have a "source" or "original" attribute, Google would totally ignore it.
Of course, how I expect Google to behave is purely theorical. But I hope my suggestion would help future users to search images or protect creators of Internet.

Thank you for reading.
Sincerely,Yvan Houard.

Received on Thursday, 25 April 2019 14:05:28 UTC