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Re: coding attributes for image links

for

From: Jared Smith
Date: May 6, 2009 10:30AM

On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 9:44 AM, Christophe Strobbe wrote:

>>And considering the general compliance to standards in IE versus "the
>>other browsers", this should probably be evidence enough that IE is
>>probably doing it wrong.
>
> 1. Does this mean that the real reason behind this interpretation of
> the HTML 4 spec is IE bashing?

Yes. :-) Mostly.

> 2. There are no official reference implementations of HTML (in fact,
> I have never seen a browser that implements all of HTML), so the
> behaviour of other browsers is not always a reliable indicator.

True. But if you have 10 browsers that interpret things one way and IE
that interprets it an entirely different way, I think it's relatively
safe to assume which interpretation is more likely to be correct.

We see this all the time - if enough browsers do things regardless of
whether it's right or not, it naturally becomes *the* way of doing it.
Take the fact that screen readers read title text for form elements
missing a label. By the spec, I think this is totally wrong and
inappropriate, but if everyone does it, it eventually becomes an
appropriate technique (as is evidenced by its inclusion as a technique
in WCAG 2.0).

>>Ultimately, it doesn't really matter that much though.
>
> Does this mean that stating that IE's behaviour is not according to
> specification is unnecessary quibbling?

Yeah. If the debate is over correct implementation of the HTML spec,
then it's noteworthy. But the discussion here is about accessibility.
Some argue the alt tooltip is useful for accessibility and others
argue that it is distracting and decreases accessibility. There won't
be consensus here, but quibbling over such things can be fun and even
enlightening sometimes.

Jared