Maybe it’s because he’s picking on me and nobody else while onstage in a forum that wasn’t archived (e.g., a Web Essentials presentation), but could Steve Faulkner get stuffed, please? In a highly accessible way, of course?

Contrary to his many assertions, the links in my PDF article were completely understandable in their intended context. Pulling them out of context (which some enjoy doing, the way others enjoy pulling wings off flies) makes no sense at all – you know, like this nutbar business in WCAG 2 that all your headings and links must make perfect sense when extracted and arbitrarily rearranged.

Sadly, we don’t have to wait for WCAG 2 to experience that nonsense, since it’s also built into WCAG 1.0 Checkpoint 13.1 in the context of links. That, however, is an erratum. We’re supposed to be smart about which parts of WCAG 1 are bollocks, are we not? This is one of them, as links cannot make sense in context and out of context unless they are never used inline in a sentence. In truth, many WCAG Working Group members want the Web reduced to that: All your links piled up at the end in an ordered list. But that is not now and never will be the real Web. Steve himself doesn’t write that way. And why should he?

Hence my use of the title attribute to give “advisory information” in that sense is perfectly compliant with the HTML specification. It is also compliant with WCAG, since the destinations of the links he complains about really are clear in the context I use them. Furthermore, PDF and .exe link targets were identified as such using – wait for it! – type="" and clear words in the body copy.

We are talking about the context of writing on the real Web. There, as at the opera, your gloves have to match your shoes, and if you wear only one of those you look like an arse. I don’t suppose Steve’s intent was to make me look like an arse? Why else would he use this in his source code?

<img src="images/homer.jpg" width="112" height="128" title="not Joe Clak" [sic] alt="x-ray of homer simpson head revealing an small brain" [sic] class="slideimg" />

Incidentally, Steve, explain to us why authors should change their writing style to accommodate notoriously broken user agents like Jaws. (They’re so broken you documented it yourself!) It simply isn’t our problem if they cannot handle common HTML attributes. Adding a title to a link is, by spec, not make-or-break; it’s not like we’re tying to bring Google Earth into compatibility with Jaws. It’s trifling, which makes it all the more outrageous that Freedom Scientific hasn’t fixed it yet.

Does all this have anything to do with my telling Roger Hudson Robert Spriggs and David Woodbridge onstage and offstage last year that many of the examples in his presentation were factually incorrect, and of course with my proving the much-admired Bruce Maguire even more factually incorrect in my PDF article? Confirm or deny, please, Steve.