2012-07-24 21:58, Ian Hickson wrote:
On Tue, 24 Jul 2012, Edward O'Connor wrote:
The spec currently disallows conformance checkers from reporting <img>
elements without alt="" attributes as an error when <meta
name=generator> is present[1].
I've adjusted the text to make it clearer that validators can report the
error in this case, just that they are discouraged from doing so.
This is an improvement, but I think Edward O'Connor's points still
apply. Just saying that the page was generated by a generator has no
logical relationship to the issue of alt texts.
I think it would be better to keep the alt attribute always required but
recommend that conformance checkers have an option of switching off
errors related to this, due to situations where automatically generated
markup contains a large number of img elements without alt attributes.
Such situations can be *understandable* for practical reasons, but this
does not make the markup good and recommendable.
Making alt required is good policy, and making it always required keeps
things simple and understandable. There are cases where documents
inevitably deviate from a specification, in a manner that causes some
trouble without causing serious trouble in *most* browsing situations.
Therefore conformance checkers should be configurable, in issues like this.
Yucca
