A proposed scheme for parsing preformatted alt text

[Luke Emmet]

Hi Kevin

On 07-Sep-2020 10:06, Kevin Sangeelee wrote:
> Anything that adds text that's really only parseable by a machine is 
> just a teeny bit user-hostile.

Well the alt-text never gets shown to the user, it is invisible to them. 
Some clients might act on it (for example at the moment to show a tool tip).

My personal view is that the CSS style delimiters attribute1: value; is 
less hostile than others. So it was part of the design consideration. 
Those clients or users wanting a simple experience can just ignore it 
all anyway.

> The ideas being discussed go further, because (unless I misunderstand) 
> it encourages text in weird unaligned formats to be served up by default.
>
> I would argue (on behalf of the Devil, of course) that mono-spaced 
> preformatted text is already perfect for aligning user-readable 
> tables. It's just awkward for machines to process semantically. There 
> are however reasonably reliable heuristics to figure out columns, 
> should the client want to add decoration. etc.

Yes everyone seems to have noticed the strange table format of the 
example. That example is misleading, as the real intention was to show 
where the attribute lives in technical terms (quoting from Bouncepaw's 
original post). I'm not proposing a new table format - CSV or TSV is 
probably the most appropriate format.

> Perhaps the alt-text could be used to specify something like 'source: 
> /data/my_original.csv', to give a person-readable route to 
> machine-readable data that the client could use to fetch and render 
> in-place on behalf of the user.

That could be a possible attribute people could try out, which might be 
important in some contexts. Perhaps it might apply where source code is 
quoting from a larger source.

Best Wishes

  - Luke