With the advancements in IDEs, many elements have TAB completion. So I can type img in my file, and press TAB, and end up with <img src="" alt="" />
This is very convenient! But what it does is take away what was previously the sole indicator of author intent- the presence of an alt attribute and whether there was a value or not. With the alt attribute being added automatically, it is still very easy for an author to ignore putting a value in the code for the attribute.
The way I have done this in some code checkers is to check for the combination of an empty alt attribute and the role="none" (or presentation). If only the alt attribute is there, I throw an error, which is used to get the developers attention.
However, this approach fails current validation checkers.
Proposal
As such, I propose that we should allow three ways to indicate that an image is purely decorative:
Right now, this is the way that an author crafts a conformant image element that is purely presentational:
I don't want to change this, but I want to propose that we add an additional invocation that does not fail conformance checkers:
Why
With the advancements in IDEs, many elements have TAB completion. So I can type
img
in my file, and press TAB, and end up with<img src="" alt="" />
This is very convenient! But what it does is take away what was previously the sole indicator of author intent- the presence of an
alt
attribute and whether there was a value or not. With thealt
attribute being added automatically, it is still very easy for an author to ignore putting a value in the code for the attribute.The way I have done this in some code checkers is to check for the combination of an empty
alt
attribute and therole="none"
(orpresentation
). If only thealt
attribute is there, I throw an error, which is used to get the developers attention.However, this approach fails current validation checkers.
Proposal
As such, I propose that we should allow three ways to indicate that an image is purely decorative:
This would support the lovely advancements in convenience that IDEs have made while also still providing a good way for validators to ensure intent.