Tim Bray wrote:
>  Having said that, I think that certain HTML idioms, such as
>  
>  <img src="URL of picture" alt="local text" longdesc="URL of text">
>  
>  are really bad markup design and aren't worth grandfathering.  Why
>  bad? Suppose you want to have descriptions (long or short) in more
>  than one language, and suppose you want to provide multiple sizes of
>  the picture, etc; 

The URI people keep telling me that's a job for content-negotiation,
providing multiple representations of a single resource.  I guess
there's a good question about whether the longdesc resource is just a
representation of the same resource identified by the src attribute...
How deep do you really want to go with this?

Alt text in multiple languages might be handy, I agree.

>  in fact, while you can argue about the appropriate
>  uses of elements and attributes almost forever, this is a good
>  example of how not to use attributes.  

I dunno about that, unless maybe we want to get into requiring all
URI-containing values to be child elements rather than elements.  I
don't see any reason that src and longdesc don't both qualify as
metadata about the img element, though I'm sure I could come up with
something vaguely plausible.

-- 
Simon St.Laurent
Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets
Errors, errors, all fall down!
http://simonstl.com

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