[Pmwiki-users] Re: Re: encouraging alt text was Re: markup musings, with missing #7 restored

[Christian Ridderström]

On Sun, 23 May 2004, Crisses wrote:

> 
> On May 23, 2004, at 9:05 AM, Christian Ridderstr?m wrote:
> 
> >> Attach:w3c.jpg"This is my dog Spot."
> >
> > I think a drawback with quotes is that it's less clear that it's an
> > alternate text. Maybe adding a '|' between would make it better, eg
> >
> > 	 Attach:w3c.jpg | "This is my dog Spot."
> 
> What happens with tables then?

There's no conflict with tables since they use '||' and not '|'.

> At the point of Attach:w3c.jpg | "This is my dog Spot." I think it 
> becomes becomes harder to search on consistenly.  yeah, the combination 
> of (in perl-compatible-regex terms)  '/.[tla]\s\"/' might be rare but 
> '/.[tla]\"/' would be rarer, I think, and the attachment in this case 
> is literal to the user.

I think my objection is mainly that I find

	Attach:w3c.jpg"This is my dog Spot."

uglier than

 	 Attach:w3c.jpg | "This is my dog Spot."

What would you say about the following compromise?

 	 Attach:w3c.jpg|"This is my dog Spot."

The extra '|' makes me happier since there is a little bit more
"space" between the filename and the alternate text. In addition,
since '|' often mean OR, you could read it as <image> OR <alternate
text>.

> The quotes make it obvious that it's a quote...

To be honest, I'm not sure we should be talking about a quote in this
case. Here is a quote .-) about the purpose of the alternate text:

  The ALT text is meant to be alternative text, primarily for use when
  the image is not being displayed. The most common mistake (if used
  at all!) is to provide a description of the image, without
  considering what job the image was doing on the page, leading to
  results that can range from the incongruous to the absurd. The ALT
  text is intended to be a suitable textual alternative to the purpose
  of the image: sometimes that might turn out to be a description of
  the image, but in practice that choice seems to be wrong far more
  often than it's right.

We should incorporate the above into your documentation text below.

> which is where the intuitiveness comes in.  documentation would say:
>
> This is how you attach images.  First tell the wiki you want a picture 
> attached to the document by saying "Attach:" then, without spaces, you 
> put the name of the image file.  It's a great idea to put a quote 
> description of the image as well, as in "the image description".  
> Example (note the lack of spaces between elements):
> 
> 	Attach:joesdog.jpg"This is a picture of my dog Spot."
> 
> The lack of spaces links all of these elements together for the wiki.  
> This will first ask someone to upload the file if it is not uploaded 
> already, and once the file is already uploaded, it will display the 
> image of Joe's dog.  For someone who is using a voice interpreter of 
> the website, using a text-only venue, or who leaves images in their 
> browser turned off, they will see or hear "This is a picture of my dog 
> Spot." where the image would have been.  This is called "alternate 
> text" and can be very important to make a webpage accessible to 
> everyone.
> 
> 
> end of lecture. :)

Kudos for documentating :-)

> > Another alternative is a separate directive for inserting an image, 
> > e.g.
> >
> > 	[[figure w3c.jpg This is my dog Spot.]]
> 
> This still would work with [[figure joesdog.jpg"This is a picture of my 
> dog Spot."]] and would not be confused with [[url | link text]] or the 
> current [[free link]] ideas.

What about a case where we have spaces in the filename? We'd have:

	[[figure some file with spaces in the name.jpg"This is my dog."]]

where I'd really like something between 'jpg' and 'This'. Compare this to:

	[[figure some file with spaces in the name.jpg | This is my dog.]]

which looks much cleaner to me. Both of these syntaxes could of course
be allowed, there's no syntactial reason why they couldn't co-exist.

> >> making the above [[W3C | Attach:w3c.jpg"World Wide Web Consortium"]]
> >
> > Using a separate directive that would like like this:
> >
> > 	[[W3C | [[figure w3c.jpg World Wide Web Consortium]]]]
	[[W3C | Attach:w3c.jpg"World Wide Web Consortium"]]
> 
> And is more characters to type...

You're right, we have 54 v.s. 51 characters here... ;-)

With a space in the filename, the comparison becomes:

	[[W3C | [[Attach:file name.jpg"World Wide Web Consortium"]]]]
 	[[W3C | [[figure file name.jpg | World Wide Web Consortium]]]]

which is one character longer...

> and I think less like living language -- less like writing prose --
> which is more what this is supposed to be; a (attempt towards)
> natural extension of prose writing.

Hmm.. I'm not sure I see why it'd be less like a living language (the
use of "figure" seems advantageous to me here), but I do agree that
aiming for "prose" is a good idea for users' who are unused to
computers etc.

/Christian

-- 
Christian Ridderstr?m                           http://www.md.kth.se/~chr