On Fri, 20 Jan 2006 16:55:43 +0600, Matthew Raymond
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
This sounds reasonable. I guess I should change my statement:
The alt attrubute should be made optional, and when it's omitted, the UA
should try to obtain some useful information from the file name or by
other means.
I'm not sure I agree. If you look at what you might use <img> for,
it's almost always presentational, and could therefore be done with CSS.
The more semantic the image, the more necessary alternate content
becomes, thus making the |alt| attribute necessary for a truly semantic
<img> element. If you find yourself using <img alt=""> a lot, it's
probably because you're not making proper use of CSS, or because you're
using <img> elements to achieve a presentational effect that is
currently not possible with just CSS 2.1 (yet may likely be possible in
CSS 3).
I'm not speaking about <img> with specified but empty alt -- this one is
certainly presentational, and it's OK to require explicit alt="" for this
case. I'm speaking about <img> with totally omitted alt, which is
currently invalid. I propose to allow it and have the user agent derive
some information from the image URL. This will better reflect the real
world situation: many authors actually omit alt (which results in an
invalid page) when they actually should have written it.
--
Opera M2 8.5 on Debian Linux 2.6.12-1-k7
* Origin: X-Man's Station [ICQ: 115226275] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
