Imagine if your browser is not only a markup rendering engine, and it acts as an information broker. We usually visit different websites to fulfill our needs or daily activities like buying & selling something, gather some information or manage our social network. The general model is we travel to a particular site then proceed to enter data. Information is scattered in the web we have to choose which site we want to use. If we don’t have any idea which site to use then we search it on the web. Imagine a scenario i want to sell my old car and i blog about it, and a classifieds website find it when it aggregate advertisements across the web.

Have you been over hearing people talk about Microformats and thought to yourself “what are those?”

Microformats can be defined as

simple conventions for embedding semantic markup for a specific problem domain
in human-readable (X)HTML/XML documents, Atom/RSS feeds, and “plain” XML
that normalize existing content usage pattern
using brief, descriptive class names
often based on existing inter operable standards
to enable decentralized development
of resources, tools, and services

Examples:
Flickr using microformats which lets user to geotag their photos
upcoming.yahoo.com using hCalender microformat to aggregate events.

• Universality: The notion of “anyone, anywhere, any device“. I think this is what people usually mean by accessibility.
• Interoperability: Processable by any software which is has general standards-compliance, including ones which aren’t perfect. Doesn’t just mean browsers: also includes search engines, Content Management Systems, etc.
• Device independance: Renders sensibly on any device (PC monitor, TV screen, mobile phone, PDA, tactile interface, speech output, etc) and on any platform (Windows, Mac, Linux, etc) when using generally standards-compliant software.
• Accessibility: Has good usability for disabled people.
• Best practise: Attempting all the above!

  By sitesurgeon

  Understand W3C In 7 Points

This document will summarize the level of support for web standards and maturing technologies in popular web browsers. It covers the Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Opera web browsers, with focus on the HTML, CSS, DOM, and ECMAScript technologies.

http://www.webdevout.net/browser_support.php

The meaning of alt text is to serve as replacement (hence, “alternative”) when the image the HTML intends to serve cannot be seen. There’s a variety of reasons for that to happen; the user is blind, the medium doesn’t support images, the user disabled images on purpose so she can browse on low-bandwidth, or the Googlebot comes around to visit.

For example, when your image is a mere illustration to a point you’re repeating elsewhere in the text, there’s no need at all to use the alt text. Because the image is not crucial to understanding the point. Most people however at this point heard some rumors that the “alt tag” is increasing accessibility; and possibly, they’ve heard somewhere else that accessibility is professional these days. And they also might want to see a tool-tip, not knowing that the title attribute would come in handy for that. (Wordpress in typical installations even creates an alt text based on the image’s file name; tools like Frontpage have committed similar silliness in the past.)

So, let’s say our blog post is titled “New AJAX Flavor Discovered” and the illustration following the headline is a shrink-wrap box with the shiny colorful letters “AJAX,” then repeating the letters AJAX in the alt text will result in something like this within alternative browsing contexts:

New AJAX Flavor Discovered
AJAX

Is this useful? No – the point of the illustration was to use a recognizable catchy visual, or to suggest that AJAX is hyped as a shrink-wrapped shiny product; the point was not to clarify (in text) that the article is about AJAX, as the headline already did a good job at that.

In XHTML2, by the way, some of us may be able to get rid of the alt attribute altogether. Why? In XHTML2 you can use the “src” attribute on anything, including e.g. a paragraph. It’s a bit like longdesc (today’s link to a longer image description) done right.

Misunderstand Web Standards