[Lynx-dev] @longdesc support in Lynx

[Leif Halvard Silli]

Lynx  currently has no support for @longdesc. 
@longdesc provides "link to long description (complements alt)".
See: http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/index/attributes.html
Example: <img alt="Chart fo the development" 
longdesc="description-of-chart" src=i.jpg >

Any chance that Lynx, with its history as a accessibility web browsers, 
could implement @longdesc support?

I have a concrete proposal for how it should be implemented: The best 
approach seems to me to be to implement it as if the image is an 
image map, where the URL inside @longdesc represents the link of
 the image map. 

Thus, practically speaking, I would expect @longdesc to work just like 
the following image map example - which is an example that has been 
crafted solely in order to show one may mimic the @longdesc behavior by 
using a simple image map: [1]

|1] http://malform.no/testing/longdesc/address@hidden 

One particular detail: For image maps, the link text is provided via 
the @alt attribute of the <area> element. However, for @longdesc, 
screenreaders such as the well known Jaws, offers a "hard coded" text. 
In Jaws's case, the hard coded text is "Press enter for long 
description". And hence the example [1] provides the same text as link 
text for the image map replication of the @longdesc.

Whether LYnx should do the same, or if Lynx should simply present 
the address of the link as link text, is probably up for debate. Or a 
combination: Offer the a text, in combinatio with the URL. Something 
like this:

Long description: http://example.com/long/desc.html

The latter seems optimal to me.

PS: I have also filed the same bug for Elinks. Text browsers have a 
pretty uniform implementation of image maps. And it would be nice if 
they also had a working, uniform implementation of @longdesc. The 
Elinks bug: http://bugzilla.elinks.cz/show_bug.cgi?id=1104
-- 
leif halvard silli