[whatwg] Alt text authoring Re: Conformance for Mail clients
Maciej Stachowiak
mjs at apple.com
Sat Apr 21 16:25:40 PDT 2007
On Apr 21, 2007, at 11:30 AM, Jon Barnett wrote:
> I've been following this and gathering thoughts.
[...]
> 2. Images that are content but don't represent text (though they
> may be accompanied by a caption - even if the caption could be the
> alt text, it would be redundant with the caption repeated in the
> markup)
> <p>These are my vacation photos:
> <ul><li><img src="grandcanyon.jpg">My wife and I at the Grand
> Canyon...</ul>
[...]
> For (2), authors have a few choices:
> (a) Use the <img> tag and leave the alternate text blank. [...]
> Requiring the alt attribute causes a problem here and simply
> leaving the attribute's value blank doesn't clear up enough ambiguity.
[...]
> (c) Use the <object> tag with fallback content. This is probably
> the most useful option doesn't naturally cause any problems. The
> only real issue is that neither HTML4 nor HTML5 explicitly describe
> (1) and (2), and say to use <img> for (1) and object for (2)
How is an <object> with empty fallback content different from an
<img> with an empty alt value? It seems like it is just as ambiguous,
since if the fallback content were non-empty it should be substituted.
I think a better option would be to distinguish alt="", and use that
for images in the content that add no meaning as the draft says
today, and no alt attribute at all for images that are meaningful,
but where a text description is not available or appropriate. We
could limit <img> with no alt attribute to content generated by
WYSIWYG editors, in the same way as <font>. Or something like that.
Basically we can distinguish the two cases by alt="" and entirely
omitted alt.
Regards,
Maciej
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