LYNX-DEV beyond ALT advocacy

[Al Gilman]

The widespread non-use of the ALT attribute on IMG tags is a
problem.  Better user of ALT tags would be better, no doubt.

On the other hand, I want to point out some other things that
will also help with this problem; things that we, the users and
developers of lynx can do ourselves.

*** Users, learn the List Page. ***

The users can use the List Page more.  This is normally accessed
by the letter-L keystroke (or lower-case l).  The list page lists
the URLs from a page and the URLs are clickable - if you click on
one, it takes you where that URL points.

This gives you all the information that using the URL as a
pseudo-ALT would.  Not all web authors use mnemonic file names,
but more of them use file names that tell you what the file is
about than use ALT strings.

Try this on http://www.cassettenet.com for example.

*** Developers, GET those TITLEs. ***

What the developers can do is to change Lynx to use HTTP more
agressively to get a textual description of what is at the end of
an HREF link.  I have been holding back on advocating this
because I haven't yet done the research on precisely what
information transfer is called for in HTTP.  But where the HREF
points to a hypertext page, there is almost always a title for
the page which is the brief description of the page topic that
the authors _are populating_ in the large.

What I don't know is whether a head request is enough to get the
remote page's title in most cases or whether retrieval of the
page text and parsing of the HEAD section is necessary.

In any case, I find the prospects for achieving widespread good
ALT usage to be slim, and I think that Lynx should be willing to
go out over the network to get the TITLE of cited pages.  This
would significantly improve the legibility of today's web pages
by Lynx and in a text-only mode.  It is a smaller burden on the
shared Internet bandwidth than getting the images the way an
estimated 75% of Web usage does.

--
Al Gilman
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