[whatwg] Alt text authoring Re: Conformance for Mail clients

[Jon Barnett]

On 4/22/07, Kornel Lesinski <kornel at osiolki.net> wrote:
> On Sun, 22 Apr 2007 01:26:55 +0100, Jon Barnett <jonbarnett at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > By "entirely omitted alt", do you still only mean WYSIWYG editors?  If
> > not, I agree.  The distinction would be as follows:
> > (1) <img src="obvious.jpg" alt="obvious"> - This image represents text,
> > particularly the word "obvious".  Lynx should replace it with the word
> > "obvious" and do nothing else.
> > (2) <img src="gallery2.jpg">  The image is part of the content and
> > doesn't represent text.  Lynx should indicate that the image is missing
> > and offer a way to download it
>
> I'm a bit worried about this one - authors too often forget (or don't
> care) to add alt attribute, and this case gives it a different meaning.
>
> I think that for (2) there should be either magic alt value or some way of
> specyfing that alt was intentionally omitted, and not forgotten (special
> classname? presence of title attribute?).
>
> --
> regards, Kornel Lesiński
>

The "rel" attribute isn't specified for the img element, but this
might be a good use for it - what relationship does this image have
with the document.

Thoughts on that, or something new?

If the alt attribute is required, what should it be for (2)?  Blank?
A paragraph describing the vista of the Grand Canyon?