2012-07-25 15:05, Henri Sivonen wrote:
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
The big question is whether that would be enough to solve the problem
of generators generating bogus alts in order to pass validation.
No, and it would not solve most of the other problems in the World Wide
Web either. But it would solve the problem of confused authors as well
as the practical problem that authors may wish to check their markup
even when using software that generates img tags without alt attribute.
I predict generator writers would want the generator output to pass
validation with the default settings
Quite possibly. We cannot prevent people from writing and selling buggy
software. A generator may produce valid code, or invalid code. We should
not change the definition of valid just to match some generator
behavior. After all, what's the point of using validation if you use a
generator? You would in effect be testing the generator, something that
its vendor should have done. We should not be concerned about helping
generator vendors to advertize their products as producing valid code
(code that passes validation) when they in fact produce code that
violates established good practices of HTML.
The situation where a generator has to emit img tags without being able
to insert any meaningful alt attributes is a real one, though rather
special. According to normal accessibility principles, a generically
informative alt attribute is better than no alt attribute, which just
says "here's an image and we're not telling you anything about it,
probably because a lazy author didn't give the issue any thought". Even
alt="unknown image" or alt="unknown image named foobar.jpg" is better
than lack of alt attribute (or alt="").
Yucca
