Re: [htdig] htdig scans alt's

[Gilles D. <gr...@sc...>]

According to Emil Wilmanski:
> What to do to sotp htdig to scan alt's in tag <img> 

According to Jamie Anstice:
> I've got a patch for this - I'll post in a day or so.

Does the patch add a config attribute for this?  Otherwise, it's a
pretty trivial change to comment out or remove the section of code
in htdig/HTML.cc's HTML::do_tag() method that deals with the "alt"
attribute of img tags.

I am rather surprised at the number of objections I've seen to this
behaviour in htdig, added back in 3.1.4.  There must be a lot of sites
that use the alt text attribute in incorrect or nonsensical ways.

When used correctly, the text in the alt attribute of img tags should
flow nicely with the text around it (that's how text-only browsers will
use it after all), so I would have thought that the addition of this
feature would be welcome.  I guess there are a lot of people out there
who still use alt text for nonsense like "red ball" or "this is alt text".

Should this feature be optional in future releases?

-- 
Gilles R. Detillieux              E-mail: <gr...@sc...>
Spinal Cord Research Centre       WWW:    http://www.scrc.umanitoba.ca/~grdetil
Dept. Physiology, U. of Manitoba  Phone:  (204)789-3766
Winnipeg, MB  R3E 3J7  (Canada)   Fax:    (204)789-3930