[css-image-animation] Suggest a different term than "decorative"

[aardrian]

The draft defines "decorative image" as:

An image inserted into the document rendering by CSS, through such properties as background-image or border-image.

I assume this would also include images called via content().

The issue I am raising is that the concept of decorative images already has a meaning in the context of WCAG:

pure decoration
serving only an aesthetic purpose, providing no information, and having no functionality

W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative provides guidance and a decision tree to help decide if an image is decorative.

Decorative images also have a meaning in the context of CSS, as described in CSS Generated Content Module Level 3's guidance on alternative text:

This allows, for example, purely decorative text to be elided in speech output (by providing the empty string as alternative text), and allows authors to provide more readable alternatives to images, icons, or text-encoded symbols.

My suggestion is that the CSS Image Animation Module WD replace uses of "decorative image" with maybe "CSS-inserted image" or something less clunky than my imagination can propose right now.

This would help keep three W3C specs aligned on the meaning instead of having one with a wholly divergent meaning from at least two other specs.

[frivoal]

Thanks for the feedback. Another way to address this problem could be to drop the distinction altogether. Distinguishing between "content images" and "decorative images" was important for an earlier draft of the spec, where the image-animation property had a controls value, which would have different effects on content and decorative images. But we ended up not pursuing this, and so the difference is not longer necessary.

If we later need the distinction again, it would make sense to align with other specs (or at least not conflict), as you suggest, but until we do, I think it will be simpler to just collapse the two categories into one.

[aardrian]

I would be down with dropping the distinction.