"I’m curious if the mandatory alt-attribute survives past XHTML2"

The <img> tag doesn't even make it into XHTML2! XHTML2 has a different approach to images. Basically <img> was really badly designed: no proper fallback, the weak alt attribute which can only hold un-marked-up text, and longdesc that is so hard to use that almost nobody does.

XHTML2 lets you put the src attribute on *any* element, which basically declares that the image and the element content are meant to be equivalent. If the user has switched off images (or they are not otherwise available, for instance on a voice browser), or the browser can't handle that type of image, or whatever, then you can still arrange for your page to be meaningful in some way.

Steven Pemberton
(one of the two people credited in Wikipedia for propagating the "Google is a blind user" quote: see under Arachnaphobia)

Interesting.

There's also the Object-tag which was a somewhat cleaner replacement even for images – but it completely didn't take off. I wonder if the "src" attribute applied on anything has a chance to take off? It sort of sounds like those CSS hacks which create a background-image on div-containers and the like, and then remove the content those containers had...

"Google is a blind user" actually originated with a post of mine to Don Marti's linux-elitists list in January of 2002. Steven Pemberton's one of the folks who picked up the meme in several of his W3C presentations, and has been kind enough to credit me.

Original may be found at: http://zgp.org/pipermail/linux-elitists/2002-January/003898.html

Peace.