[whatwg] alt and title attribute exception

[Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis]

On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 1:03 PM, Steve Faulkner
<faulkner.steve at gmail.com> wrote:
>> The alt attribute does not represent advisory information. User agents must
>> not present the contents of the alt attribute in the same way as content
>> of the title attribute.

[snip]

> In situations where alt it not
> present on an img but title is, in webkit based browsers the title
> attribute content is displayed on mouse hover and is also displayed in
> place of the image when images are disabled or not available. This
> implementation appears to contradict the must requirement in the spec.

Debatable. It's not showing @alt on hover, so their presentation is different.

I think showing @alt on hover, as IE used to do, was the behavior this
text was intending to discourage. That this behavior was wrong was
after all a major tenet of:

http://www.hixie.ch/advocacy/alttext

This was premised on @alt being (potentially long) equivalent text
rather than being a short name for the image though. Once both @alt
and @title can be used to provide what could loosely be called titling
information, the rationale for presenting the two differently begins
to weaken.

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis