was setting up a github page using github flavored markdown (fuck github pages' default styling and especially fuck its putting the big dumb url-of-the-page-you're-on thing at the top) because keybase shut down keybase.pub so i'm gonna have to rehost a bunch of stuff, and i ran into the problem of  not showing up on mouseover, which confused me for a few moments, but once i looked up how to do it (which is one of the parts where gfm is actually implementing the syntax as intended so i can't complain) i think cohost should support that syntax, which it doesn't right now. an example:

which is turned by compliant markdown preprocessors into:
right now cohost just sticks [alt text] into both fields, but my understanding of the intent behind the fields is that alt exists to be used either by screen readers, or as a fallback if the image doesn't load for whatever reason (try inspecting the element and fucking up the image url); whereas title is mouseover tooltip text that may for example give more information/context. hell there's no reason it couldn't still just put the bracketed text into both fields if there's no title text stuck in with the url, so that it wouldn't be confusing at all and people could keep on using it exactly as they do without wondering why the hell their alt text suddenly isn't showing up on mouseover.
i will say this: as it stands i have a habit of, without really even thinking about it, mousing over images just to see whether the person bothered putting alt text, because accessibility is important, but do i really need an easy way to be casually judging people over that? emphatically no. do i as a sighted person really need a straightforward description of an image i'm already looking at with my own eyes? also no. do i think not making it possible to have these two things separate short of typing the whole html tag out enables sighted people to not see title text as an accessibility feature, but somewhere to put a cutesy description that might not be all that helpful to someone who actually needs that feature to use the website? unsure. but otoh, having somewhere to put a little reward for a user who thinks to try mousing over the image like xkcd does is great


