graphic v. mediaobject (was Re: Lame newbie DocBook questions (long-ish))

[John Fleck <jfleck inkstain net>]

On Thu, Aug 23, 2001 at 01:47:29PM +0100, Calum Benson wrote:
> 
> I've never used DocBook before, and have a couple of questions (to which
> the answer is probably "RTFM") that have arisen as I've been trying to
> convert the GNOME Accessibility Guide to DocBook format from HTML.
> 
> First... browsing through the GDP styleguide, it says that the <graphic>
> tag should be used for including screenshots.  But I couldn't find any
> way to provide an alternate textual description of the screenshot this
> way, i.e. something that will be converted to an ALT tag by db2html.  Is
> there one?  This is vital for our documentation to be accessible.
> 
> Reading the DocBook reference, the only way I could find to do this was
> using <mediaobject>, i.e:
> 
> <mediaobject>
>   <imageobject>
>    <imagedata fileref="images/depend1" format="PNG">
>   </imageobject>
>   <textobject>
>     <phrase>ALT text goes here</phrase>
>   </textobject>
> </mediaobject>
> 
> which works perfectly (when converted to HTML at least), but I don't
> want to do that if it goes against our recommendations or causes
> problems for other formats.  (I also note that <graphic> is disappearing
> from DocBook before long anyway...)
> 

I say use <mediaobject>, and if <graphic> causes an accessiblity
problem because of a lack of alt tags (rhetorical "if" here) we should
move to mediaobject as quickly as we can in general. 

We've had this discussion before, and I'm sure there must be some
reason we haven't done this already, but I can't remember it.

Cheers,
-- 
John Fleck
jfleck inkstain net (h), http://www.inkstain.net/fleck/