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Is there a technical reason we aren't embedding alt text directly into images? It's weird that we're putting metadata that is clearly tied to the image itself into external systems, over and over again

Lady of Misrule
Public

@essentialrandom my feeling is that editing XMP tags on images is something that does not have broad open-source/library support, and it's less web friendly (since you have to download the image before processing the metadata instead of getting the metadata first and then the image) so you won't see it in APIs over the internet

Satsuma
Quiet public

@Lady @essentialrandom mh yeah i was going to say i’d only be interested in alt text getting embedded as metadata if it somehow preserved the ability to retrieve alt text without the actual image for slow connections, limited data plans, & browsing old sites where 3rd party embeds have failed (ive been in all 3 situations at various points). and that seems logistically p difficult lol

Ms Boba
Quiet public

@Lady I feel like with WASM we should be able to extract text from the image somewhat performantly client side nowadays

Ms Boba
Quiet public

@Lady I meant the second one! (But I also can't wait for better OCR)

My brain is like "this is the perfect project to nerd snipe Rust people with", too bad I don't know any :P We should post the project in fandom coders at least and see if anyone would want to hack around adding and removing it from images, even just server side.

Gadfly (-booq-)
Quiet public

@essentialrandom @Lady @Satsuma The default Obscure Command-Line Program for working with metadata is `exiftool`, iirc.
(At least, that's what I use.)

(Like all free software projects named for one specific usecase, it has the capability to work with many more frameworks than just EXIF.)

Ms Boba
Quiet public

@gaditb @Lady @Satsuma oooh good to know!! I think I probably did land on it after 2 hours of research when I was trying to extract metadata out of OpenBadge images. Now to figure out the right options :P

Lady of Misrule
Quiet public

@essentialrandom @gaditb @Satsuma as an aside, i love it when the answer to a technical question is “yeah there’s a whole ecosystem of programmer folks who have experience in this subject area, they just don’t ever talk to the people writing web apps” lol

i mean this sincerely; programming is a way bigger landscape than the view from the web and i love catching glimpses of other lands

Ms Boba
Quiet public
Gadfly (-booq-)
Quiet public

@Lady @essentialrandom @Satsuma From the looks of it I think the exiftool people just Really Like Metadata.

And they're FREAKING RIGHT.

Ms Boba
Quiet public

@gaditb @Lady @Satsuma I cannot see it either. Would be interested in seeing whether we can push people to adopt it, because I'd definitely add reading from it/writing it into my projects.

Lady of Misrule
Quiet public

@essentialrandom @gaditb @Satsuma IPTC *does* have an alternate text field so that might be the place to start

Ms Boba
Quiet public

@Lady @gaditb @Satsuma thank you for all the research! Excited to test this out.

Ms Boba
Quiet public

@Lady @gaditb @Satsuma
Please imagine the "it could work" gif from Frankenstein Jr in place of this text

(I will look into it if no one else gets to it first. I've actually been trying to figure out something similar for my own SSG, even beyond alt text)

Gadfly (-booq-)
Quiet public

@essentialrandom @Lady @Satsuma I think it might also be a perl library that goes with it, so if you wanted to incorperate it into your contemporary social network app you are maintaining which is a webapp server written in perl in 2022 for some reason then (a) congrats and (b) I don't know whether Dreamwidth is hiring but it probably wouldn't hurt to check.

Gadfly (-booq-)
Quiet public

@essentialrandom @Lady @Satsuma ... or I'm pretty sure Dreamwidth is the only ones running perl in user-facing production nowadays, at least.

I wonder if I should be scared to check.

Cocoa
Quiet public

@gaditb@icosahedron.website @essentialrandom@indiepocalypse.social @Lady@cat.family @Satsuma@cat.family well all the LJ-based systems are - so LJ, DW, DeadJournal, InsaneJournal

(Also DW doesn't make enough money to hire people, but we always welcome new volunteers :D)

Cocoa
Public

@essentialrandom@indiepocalypse.social I mean, you know one Rust person (even if I am a mere larval Rusteacean)

Ms Boba
Public

@cocoa but can I need snipe you into building WASM tools for image manipulation? :P

Cocoa
Public

@essentialrandom@indiepocalypse.social I mean. Maybe? I've never done cross-compilation to WASM but I'm willing to give it a try, particularly if you have a fairly good idea of what the functionality should be.

Cocoa
Public

@essentialrandom@indiepocalypse.social Yeah, it's definitely a neat idea! And I want to play around in Rust more because it's a good way to build close-to-the-metal standalone stuff (you know I love python, but distributing python things to non-Python people is. Challenging.)

Ms Boba
Public

@cocoa if I had time to play with Rust I'd totally do it. It seems like it's easy to bridge between Rust and JS, and some tools in the JS ecosystem are moving towards a core in Rust with the possibility of writing plugins in JavaScript. That to me is the best of both worlds cause you can have the performance of Rust, while making it possible to use the same language across the stack, which is important to me in terms of lowering barriers of entry to different layers and helping people share tools with each other.