On Apr 21, 2007, at 11:30 AM, Jon Barnett wrote:
I've been following this and gathering thoughts.
[...]
2. Images that are content but don't represent text (though they
may be accompanied by a caption - even if the caption could be the
alt text, it would be redundant with the caption repeated in the
markup)
<p>These are my vacation photos:
<ul><li><img src="grandcanyon.jpg">My wife and I at the Grand
Canyon...</ul>
[...]
For (2), authors have a few choices:
(a) Use the <img> tag and leave the alternate text blank. [...]
Requiring the alt attribute causes a problem here and simply
leaving the attribute's value blank doesn't clear up enough ambiguity.
[...]
(c) Use the <object> tag with fallback content. This is probably
the most useful option doesn't naturally cause any problems. The
only real issue is that neither HTML4 nor HTML5 explicitly describe
(1) and (2), and say to use <img> for (1) and object for (2)
How is an <object> with empty fallback content different from an
<img> with an empty alt value? It seems like it is just as ambiguous,
since if the fallback content were non-empty it should be substituted.
I think a better option would be to distinguish alt="", and use that
for images in the content that add no meaning as the draft says
today, and no alt attribute at all for images that are meaningful,
but where a text description is not available or appropriate. We
could limit <img> with no alt attribute to content generated by
WYSIWYG editors, in the same way as <font>. Or something like that.
Basically we can distinguish the two cases by alt="" and entirely
omitted alt.
Regards,
Maciej
