[whatwg] Alt text authoring Re: Conformance for Mail clients
Maciej Stachowiak
mjs at apple.com
Sun Apr 22 13:54:38 PDT 2007
On Apr 22, 2007, at 2:48 AM, Kornel Lesinski 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?).
How about:
<img src="gallery2.jpg" alt=""> -- image could be omitted without
changing the meaning of the document (screen readers or text-only
browsers could just skip it)
<img src="gallery2.jpg" noalt> -- image cannot be omitted without
changing the meaning, but no text equivalent is available (screen
readers or text-only browsers / mail clients should give some
indication that an image is there)
I'm not sure I like that better than just omitting alt entirely, but
I thought I'd throw it out there.
Regards,
Maciej
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