[whatwg] longdesc [was: A new attribute for <video> and low-power devices]

[Aryeh Gregor]

On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 8:08 PM, Jim Jewett <jimjjewett at gmail.com> wrote:
> The 99% misused is at best debatable.  I'm pretty sure that using a
> longer human-readable description instead of an URL was once
> (admittedly long ago) recommended.

In HTML 3.2, longdesc didn't exist:

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html32#img

In HTML 4, it's required to be a URI:

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/objects.html#adef-longdesc-IMG

Your other points seem reasonable, though.  I'll also note, for the
record, that since r25335 in August 2007, MediaWiki doesn't generate
bogus longdescs all over the place, so that might improve the
statistics if they were run again today.