Townson, Chris wrote:
I think my point here is this: HTML is really a text-based medium. Images have very little "meaning", for example, to a screenreader.
Ah, and people call _me_ a purist! ;-) While its foundation or tool set is text, it has included imagery for longer than it did not. After 13 years, I think we have to accept that imagery is part of the web, that the web is the medium and HTML is _one_ of the tools for conveying information on that medium. The trick is to make the _web_ accessible through the use of standards. This is the Web Standards Group, not the HTML Standards Group.
In practical terms, for HTML as it is today, what would your photo contribute to the content of a page? I recently marked up a page which consisted of information about employees. The design required inserting a photo of each employee next to their description: I used background images for those photos because they were not essential content. What was important was the bit which went: <h3>John Smith</h3> <p>John works as blah blah blah ... </p>
Actually, in a large organisation, with reasonable turnover, the images can be of greater importance than the text. At a place where I regularly contract, the Intranet carries just that sort of page for each employee, which is very useful if you have to find someone for a quick chat but, more importantly, it helps in security so you know whether or not to challenge someone who just got out of the lift on your secure floor. In this case, the photo _is_ essential content, in practical terms.
Cheers Mark Harris ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
