[matthewsimon]

There's recently been a round of debate about whether the alt attribute for media (eg, <img alt="Foo">) should remain required or could become optional.

As I understand it, some web page creators say "some of our images don't have good logical, human-readable alt text, so why make us put in alt attributes with crappy made-up values", and other people argue that it is worth the extra effort to improve accessibility. (No doubt I've butchered both sides of the argument, but that's what I was able to take away from it.)

See http://blog.whatwg.org/omit-alt for an argument in favor of making it optional, and http://www.paciellogroup.com/resources/articles/altinhtml5.h... for it being required, or http://juicystudio.com/article/requiring-alt-attribute-html5... for a list of pros and cons.

The two standards groups hosting the draft HTML specs appear to have different centers of gravity with regard to this issue, and to be making increasingly snippy comments back and forth about the other's handling of the dispute.