Making clause 10.2.4.2 (Page Titled) Void (ITI3-2 comment from Issue #682)
This clause is problematic to apply to all non-web documents. First, the technology is different between the web and non-web documents. In the web, the title attribute is used to provide a name for the tab within a user agent to help a user navigate to different web pages represented in tabs within the browser.
Non-web documents may or may not have a true title. Images, CMS files, and many other things are unable to have a meaningful title either inside of the document or as a document file name. A file name really isn’t a title, though on the Web it is served up as part of the name of the browser tab. Then there may or may not be a “Title” inside of a document; often there is no title at all. Not all document formats support having a true style of title inside of a document (e.g. plain text files, images, videos, etc.). While other document types do provide a title style, it may or may not be programmatically be a title and served up as part of the window title (analogous to browser tabs). There are also many documents that shouldn’t have a title within the document (e.g. personal letters, images, etc.)
Additional difficulties with having a document or file name that “describes the topic or purpose”: • File systems may not allow special characters, such as punctuation or spaces, that could provide more meaningful phrasing of a title • Documents stored in a content management system or a database often do not allow authors to modify the document name to be something meaningful and may further restrict the available characters you can use (e.g. GitHub doesn’t allow spaces in file names) • Auto-generated documents typically will not have a meaningful title or file name (e.g. daily reports, AI-generated documents) • Works of art (books, images of art, movies, audio files, etc.) are often titled something that doesn’t describe the topic or purpose of that work. If the title is supposed to be once the file is opened, a visible title is often not present • Imaged documents - Scanned files sourced from pictures or printed paper (especially if it’s an automated process)