[whatwg] ALT and equivalent representation

[Henri Sivonen]

On Apr 19, 2008, at 07:19, Shannon wrote:
> The end result of this is that alt tags tend to be seen as a burden  
> by the majority of web designers I've met.

Of course. Once you're thinking in terms of wanting to publish and  
image, producing text *in addition* to the image is a burden.

> The ONLY "business" justification I have for using alt tags is that  
> a w3c valid site REQUIRES them and this may increase the sites  
> Google rank (which is just speculation really). If you take the  
> requirement out to use them on every image in a valid site then you  
> take away much of my argument for using them at all.

Instead of having a layer of validitity speculation in between,  
couldn't you make the point that alt helps with SEO? To me linking alt  
and SEO directly is more to the point and more honest, too.

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