<rant comment="please correct me if I'm wrong about anything">
Why should Text mode browsers benefit from the ALT property when
Graphical agents can't?
I understand that this is planned to change in future specifications but....
Why does the IMG element have an alt property? why not define a label
property instead (and longlabel) or caption property. This would make
the semantics more readable AND would allow CSS to be non-discriminative.
The problem with an ALT prop. is that it stands for 'Alternate Text'
this means that, at present, designers are having to go out of their way
to cater for disabled people and machine-based readers by adding hidden
content, while this is not 'a bad thing', it is not going to encourage
people to bother.
Also, User-Agents won't display the text because there is a better
alternative available. What book/magazine prints pictures without
labels or descriptions?
If the property name was comment or label, then designers and content
managers would see the property as a semantic and presentational
benefit. Also, CSS properties could be defined to allow styling of the
label alongside the image in graphical browsers as well as in text mode
browsers. Therefore people are more aware of the benefits of labeling
images, Designers would be encouraged to design according to good
publishing practices and (hopefully) disabled people would benefit from
more widespread accessibility.
</rant>
BTW. does anyone know a good way of stylistically adding labels to
images? At the moment i'm using:
<p class="image" title="!label!">
<img src="!URI!" alt="!label!"/><span class="label">!label!</span>
</p>
is this right? what do you suggest?
Stephen Stagg.
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