[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #21221: Image title and alt attribute content should be texturized.

[WordPress Trac]

#21221: Image title and alt attribute content should be texturized.
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 Reporter:  stephdau                            |       Owner:  (none)
     Type:  enhancement                         |      Status:  new
 Priority:  normal                              |   Milestone:
Component:  Media                               |     Version:  3.4.1
 Severity:  normal                              |  Resolution:
 Keywords:  dev-feedback has-patch 2nd-opinion  |     Focuses:
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Changes (by callumbw95):

 * keywords:  dev-feedback has-patch => dev-feedback has-patch 2nd-opinion


Comment:

 Hey all,

 I have done some digging here, and I am not sure what the benefit of
 making this change would be? As already pointed out by @joedolson there is
 no benefit to accessibility here, but I am also struggling to see the SEO
 and UI/UX benefits?

 In regards to SEO, search engines parse the `alt` text to understand image
 content and are more concerned with the words and semantic meaning, as
 opposed the typographic correctness of the punctuation. There is
 absolutely no known SEO advantage to using curly/pretty quotes over
 straight quotes in alt or title tags.

 In regards to the UI/UX benefits this may make the front end look prettier
 when a page fails to load and the alt tag has been texturized, but as we
 are actively trying to avoid images failing to load, then this wouldn't
 really show up that often. But to achieve this we may introduce more
 issues as HTML attributes are themselves enclosed in straight quotes
 (e.g., `alt="..."`). While modern browsers are incredibly resilient,
 programmatically inserting different types of quotes inside the
 attribute's value can introduce a layer of unnecessary complexity. But
 also the purpose of an alt text is to be a clean, functional data string.

 It is generally considered best practice is to keep the content of
 attributes as simple and unambiguous as possible to ensure maximum
 compatibility across all platforms and user agents. Therefore I suggest we
 `close` this ticket, however it would be good to get a `2nd-opinion` here.
 😃

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Ticket URL: <https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/21221#comment:19>
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