I develop a free web browser for blind people called WebbIE (<a href="http://www.webbie.org.uk" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">http://www.webbie.org.uk</a>). The use of images in links is a problem for my users too. I use the alt tag content as text for the link: if the alt tag is blank or missing I use the filename of the target, so <a href="http://www.mypage.com/contact.htm" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">http://www.mypage.com/contact.htm</a> becomes Link 1: contact.htm (And on looking at it how it should probably just go to just "contact"...!) Offered as a real-world example (insignificant numbers vs IE, significant numbers vs blind people). -- Alasdair King WebbIE <a href="http://www.webbie.org.uk" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)"> http://www.webbie.org.uk</a> <a href="mailto:alasdair@webbie.org.uk" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">alasdair@webbie.org.uk</a> <div>On 7/15/07, Chris Casciano <<a href="mailto:chris@placenamehere.com" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">chris@placenamehere.com </a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> 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 ] [ <a href="mailto:chris@placenamehere.com" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">chris@placenamehere.com</a> ] [ <a href="http://placenamehere.com" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">http://placenamehere.com</a> ] _______________________________________________ microformats-new mailing list <a href="mailto:microformats-new@microformats.org" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">microformats-new@microformats.org </a> <a href="http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-new" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)"> http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-new</a> </blockquote></div> -- Alasdair King