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Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 08/05/06 21:19
Alan J. Flavell <flavell@physics.gla.ac.uk> scripsit:
> But HTML4 has been on the record for
> nearly a decade: for those who need longdesc, it would surely not be
> too much to ask for then to select a browser which supported it?
I'm afraid it would.
Support to longdesc is virtually nonexistent in mainstream browsers, and why
would a user switch to a special browser just because he wants to check the
long description of an image? Actually most users probably have no idea of
the longdesc attribute, and extremely few pages use it, so I don't think
users _should_ know about it.
The alt attribute is sufficient for most images. If an image needs a long
description, then it should be provided using normal methods, as text on the
page near the image or on a page linked to from there, using a normal link.
That's simple, that's understandable, and it works across browsers.
The longdesc attribute is just too poorly supported and too implicit for
anything serious. I would go as far as saying the same about the title
attribute, but you might not follow me there.
The only reason why it could make sense to _hide_ the reference to a long
description is that we might think that the long description is only for
those who cannot see the image and would therefore see or hear the reference
instead. But that's not how browsers work, and that's not how they are
required to work. Besides, even if the longdesc attribute worked
technically, how could we know that the long description does not benefit
people who _do_ see the image but just don't understand it?
The longdesc attribute could be relied on only if it were universally
supported and users were always made aware of the presence of a description.
But that would be rather close to putting a link near the image, wouldn't
it? And that's what we can do, here and now; we can even select and position
the link text.
There's one more reason not to tell authors to use longdesc. In addition to
being practically useless, it complicates things. It's a new concept to be
learned, remembered, and applied. It's an unnecessary complication in a
world where most authors still don't understand even the simple principle
behind the alt attribute.
--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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