[uf-new] img alt content statistics

[Chris Casciano]

On Jul 14, 2007, at 6:52 PM, Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis wrote:

> I'm increasingly sceptical about non-qualitative statistical  
> exercises of this sort. They need to be interpreted with great  
> caution. For example, alt="" may be compliant with the (X)HTML  
> specifications, or it may not be. You just can't tell without  
> looking at the page in question.
>
> I'm not sure why mass use or abuse of @alt, treating all webpages  
> as equals, is deterministic for hCard parsing. Doesn't there need  
> to be a subsample containing only pages with markup that would be  
> interpreted by a microformat parser as an hCard?


One thing I hope we don't lose sight of is that while we as a  
community should be promoting standards and other best practices in  
all web development and design fronts, if the microformat specs take  
a hard line on issues such as this where there is some regular use of  
a variety of techniques it may hurt both adoption on a case b case  
basis as well as how the movement as a whole is viewed in terms of  
practicality.


Image replacement techniques, bowing to CSS, when an image is  
considered "content" or not are ALL areas where reasonable people  
have reasonable arguments for pros and cons and I think its the job  
of the microformats spec writers to /wherever/ possible to support  
common coding practices, because for the most part which technique is  
appropriate is determined by one two word rule: "it depends".


Just my thought on the matter, anyway.

-- 
[ Chris Casciano ]
[ chris at placenamehere.com ] [ http://placenamehere.com ]