[whatwg] Definition of alt= attribute

[dolphinling]

Henri Sivonen wrote:
> 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.)

File -> Save

"If you save this page as is, it will be non-valid for the following 
reasons:

     You did not specify alternate text for one or more images.

The page will display properly, but will be less accessible to some 
users and will fail automated validation tests.

[Fix errors]  [Save anyway]"


...The point being that that would only be a problem to authoring tools 
that didn't do something about it--and frankly, I'd expect an authoring 
tool to give a dialog like that anyway, even if they weren't concerned 
about market share.

-- 
dolphinling
<http://dolphinling.net/>