On 5.8.2012 15:52, Henri Sivonen wrote:
People who are not the developer of the generator use validators to
assess the quality of the markup generated by the generator.
People can use tools in various ways. We cannot prevent that. But it
does not need to dictate the design of tools. People can use hammers as
toothpicks, but hammer manufacturers don't make hammers softer for this
reason.
Or, alternatively, Alice anticipates Bob's reaction and preemptively
makes her generator output alt="" before Bob ever gets to badmouth
about the invalidity of the generator's output.
So? Whose problem is this? Generators have generated nonsensical alt
attributes for years, e.g. inserting the filename and number of bytes.
Keeping the attribute required won't make much difference.
Even if we wanted to position validators as tools for the people who
write markup, we can't prevent other people from using validators to
judge markup output by generator written by others.
And it is appropriate to judge that generation of HTML has problems,
when the markup contains img elements without alt attributes. There is
no reason why this possibility should be taken away. It is true that
generator vendors can cheat by emitting alt="". We can't really prevent
that. You seem to be worried about the possibility that keeping alt
attribute required somehow pushes or forces vendors into doing such
things to stay competitive. But this sounds highly speculative.
We know that generators and other software may produce documents without
a title element or with a dummy or bogus title element like <title>New
document</title>. And surely there are situations where an automatic
generator has no way of deciding on an appropriate title element without
consulting the user. So should there also be an exception allowing the
omission of the title element, to avoid the assumed reaction by Alice,
making her generator produce <title></title> or something worse?
Yucca
