[whatwg] Definition of alt= attribute

[Henri Sivonen]

On Jan 23, 2006, at 18:43, dolphinling wrote:

> Second, it could force authoring tools to produce invalid documents  
> if the author did not provide any alt text. However, those  
> documents would be non-conformant anyway, so this is not a huge  
> problem.

It is. Authoring tools are judged by taking a page authored using the  
tool and running it through the W3C Validator or, presumably in the  
future, through an HTML5 conformance checker. Authoring tool makers  
who are capable of making their tool produce syntactically conforming  
documents will want to do so and minimize the chance that the users  
of their software tarnish the reputation of the tool in the eyes of  
people who use an automated test as a litmus test of authoring tool  
bogosity. (People who test tools that way will outnumber the people  
who make a more profound analysis due to the "validate, validate,  
validate" propaganda.)

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen at iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/