Henri Sivonen wrote:
On Jan 23, 2006, at 18:43, dolphinling wrote:
Second, it could force authoring tools to produce invalid documents
if the author did not provide any alt text. However, those documents
would be non-conformant anyway, so this is not a huge problem.
It is. Authoring tools are judged by taking a page authored using the
tool and running it through the W3C Validator or, presumably in the
future, through an HTML5 conformance checker. Authoring tool makers who
are capable of making their tool produce syntactically conforming
documents will want to do so and minimize the chance that the users of
their software tarnish the reputation of the tool in the eyes of people
who use an automated test as a litmus test of authoring tool bogosity.
(People who test tools that way will outnumber the people who make a
more profound analysis due to the "validate, validate, validate"
propaganda.)
File -> Save
"If you save this page as is, it will be non-valid for the following
reasons:
You did not specify alternate text for one or more images.
The page will display properly, but will be less accessible to some
users and will fail automated validation tests.
[Fix errors] [Save anyway]"
...The point being that that would only be a problem to authoring tools
that didn't do something about it--and frankly, I'd expect an authoring
tool to give a dialog like that anyway, even if they weren't concerned
about market share.
--
dolphinling
<http://dolphinling.net/>
