Tim Bray wrote:
> Having said that, I think that certain HTML idioms, such as
>
> <img src="URL of picture" alt="local text" longdesc="URL of text">
>
> are really bad markup design and aren't worth grandfathering. Why
> bad? Suppose you want to have descriptions (long or short) in more
> than one language, and suppose you want to provide multiple sizes of
> the picture, etc;
The URI people keep telling me that's a job for content-negotiation,
providing multiple representations of a single resource. I guess
there's a good question about whether the longdesc resource is just a
representation of the same resource identified by the src attribute...
How deep do you really want to go with this?
Alt text in multiple languages might be handy, I agree.
> in fact, while you can argue about the appropriate
> uses of elements and attributes almost forever, this is a good
> example of how not to use attributes.
I dunno about that, unless maybe we want to get into requiring all
URI-containing values to be child elements rather than elements. I
don't see any reason that src and longdesc don't both qualify as
metadata about the img element, though I'm sure I could come up with
something vaguely plausible.
--
Simon St.Laurent
Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets
Errors, errors, all fall down!
http://simonstl.com
