A proposed scheme for parsing preformatted alt text

[mbays at sdf.org]

* Thursday, 2020-09-10 at 09:55 -0600 - Alex // nytpu <alex at nytpu.com>:

>>I strongly recommend against this. The W3C has been trying to get HTML 
>>authors and browser makers to _only_ display, in tooltips, text in 
>>`title` attributes.
>[...]if we make the alt text easily visible it will no longer be 
>accessibility text and will turn into a miscellaneous-purpose field.

Good point.

I guess it will be abused that way even if most clients offer no easy 
way to view it, as "easter egg" text for those who read the source. But 
yes, if the alt text is typically shown then this abuse could easily 
become normalised. So I retract my encouragement to always show alt 
text. Thanks for explaining my mistake!

How about if clients have an easily toggled switch between showing 
preformatted text and just showing alt text? I guess that would still 
lead to more easter-egging, but maybe not too much? It seems there's 
a tradeoff between discouraging inaccessible uses as human-readable 
text, and discouraging inaccessible uses as machine-readable text...

For the closing "```", I still think clients should enforce the rule 
that no further text on these lines is allowed.

But actually this suggests another possibility: adjust the spec to allow 
text on the closing line, and have it specifically interpreted as 
a subtitle to be rendered (however the client likes, e.g. centred). That 
could divert the pressure to misuse the alt text as a title, and would 
properly close the extensibility hole.
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