On Wed, 21 Mar 2007 10:55:37 +0100, Nicholas Shanks
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I would hardly call allowing marked-up fallback rather than the
crappy "alt text" we currently have as 'almost zero benefit'. How
about we bring accessibility into the 21st century instead?
You hardly ever went to say more than a few words anyway. I agree that it
would've been nicer if it had fallback content instead, but trying to fix
it now isn't worth much I think.
I guess we have to agree to disagree here, but I think
<image src="foo">Download Foo 1.4<br><small>(12 <abbr
title="Megabytes">MB<abbr>)</small></image>
is preferable to
<img src="foo" alt="Download Foo 1.4 (12 MB)">
which it would appear you prefer.
Yeah. An abbreviation such as MB should be known by an accessibility
client anyway and I think it's also perfectly capable of dealing with a
few parenthesis. Besides, the latter has been standard practice for over a
decade and trying to change authoring habbits with respect to that now
seems silly. Besides, you can use <object> if you really care about
"proper" fallback.
Also what you're suggesting about strict is wrong and I'm not sure
where you got that from. The <plaintext> start tag for instance
works the same everywhere and it's not part of either the HTML4 or
the XHTML1 as text/html specification.
Well it ought not to work. Any elements not part of the specification
that the author declares should be ignored for forward compatibility
reasons, as has been specified by HTML since the beginning. (It might
be a MUST rather than a SHOULD, but I'm not sure.) This principal
*has* to be enforced in strict mode otherwise we hinder forward-
compatibility like this.
Well, sure. But elements that are already supported can't suddenly be
dropped (on the user agent side) in new versions. That would complicate
things way too much. User agents will always have to support everything
that's being used and doing that based on DOCTYPE sniffing (which
essentially implies versioning) is a rathole where you'd rather not go.
--
Anne van Kesteren
<http://annevankesteren.nl/>
<http://www.opera.com/>
