include img alt text in photo property

[snarfed]

one drawback of the current mf2 spec is that img alt text is lost when a higher priority name property is provided, e.g. p-name. microformats/microformats2-parsing#2 proposes preserving alt text in e.g. the photo property by making it a composite object with a new alt field when alt text is available.

this is currently blocking a bridgy feature request, snarfed/bridgy#756, so i'd love to see it added to mf2py!

example: this HTML:

<article class="h-entry">
  <span class="p-name">name</span>
  <img class="u-photo" src="/photo.jpg" alt="alt" />
</article>

would parse to this mf2:

{
  "type": ["h-entry"],
  "properties": {
    "name": ["name"],
    "photo": [{
        "value": "/photo.jpg",
        "alt": "alt"
    }]
}

[snarfed]

friendly ping! cc @kylewm since he's worked on mf2py before too.

[snarfed]

now tracked (also? instead?) in kartikprabhu#56.

[snarfed]

hey @kartikprabhu any chance of getting this into the upcoming release?

[kartikprabhu]

unlikely. Haven't even started to code this up yet; also hugely breaking change and not in spec yet.

[snarfed]

as @tantek @aaronpk et al would say, specs are best when they describe and formalize already existing behavior, not prescribe new behavior before it's been implemented anywhere. :P

no worries though, happy to wait!

[sknebel]

Would it make sense to have feature flags for things like this, so consumers could opt-in to them at first, and them being switched on by default later?

[aaronpk]

We've done some feature flag stuff in the PHP parser to selectively enable new/experimental features.

[kartikprabhu]

Should implied photo also have the alt value?

cc: @snarfed

Example:

<article class="h-entry">
  <span class="p-name">name</span>
  <img src="/photo.jpg" alt="alt" />
</article>