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current wording of spec[1]: "If the area element has an href attribute, then the area element represents a hyperlink; the alt attribute, which must then be present, specifies the text." proposed addition: "the content of the alt attribute must be a brief description of the link target." or words to that effect. [1] http://www.w3.org/html/wg/html5/#the-area
That would be wrong. For example, if the image is three digits in a triangle formation, and each digit is a link, and links 1 and 2 go to a page that says "you lost" and link 3 goes to a page that says "you win", you would want the alt="" attributes to be "1", "2", and "3" respectively, not "you lose", "you lose" and "you win". Thus the target page doesn't have much to do with what the links say in this case.
(In reply to comment #1) > That would be wrong. For example, if the image is three digits in a triangle > formation, and each digit is a link, and links 1 and 2 go to a page that says > "you lost" and link 3 goes to a page that says "you win", you would want the > alt="" attributes to be "1", "2", and "3" respectively, not "you lose", "you > lose" and "you win". Thus the target page doesn't have much to do with what the > links say in this case. ok the point being that the alt must contain an appropriate text alternative, which is clearly not stated curently. so however you want to word it the, proposal is to provide a normative statement in regards to the content of the alt attribute.
I think that this is a bad proposal for all of the reasons that we had a utter mess with @alt in general a few months ago. Why should @alt for area describe the destination? Why should/could it not describe the image being used for the image map? Or something else entirely, such as, "please click the color that you like the best?" Furthermore, why *must* @alt be omitted for area without @href? Again, why could it not simply be used to describe part of the image? Folks, this topic keeps going around and around like a Canadian dime in a US vending machine. You can't have your cake and eat it too. Either make a bunch of granular attributes to *replace* @alt (such as @destination-description, @long-description, @short-description, etc.), or stop trying to dictate the contents of an immensely general attribute.
Yeah I guess the current text isn't really rigorous, it should give an author-level requirement for the alt="" attribute's value. I'll add something.
Added in r1932.
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