On 1/15/06, Chris Barker <ftog@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> The ALT tag is required for accessibility, Jeff. I understand that
> people who can't see the page will have software that reads the text
> and the ALT tag serves for the graphics.
>
> See the web accessibility initiative page for more information:
>
> http://www.w3.org/WAI/
Yes, the ALT element is for "alternate text" to be supplied INSTEAD of
the image in situations where the image can't be displayed (such as
when using a text-only browser or when using a screen reader).
At some point, IE and other browsers (not sure if it was IE that did
it first) started displaying the ALT text when you hovered your mouse
over the image. This has resulted in many people using the ALT element
as a "hack" to get the floating text effect. It should be noted that
this is just a browser hack. It's not going to work in every browser
(as has been pointed out in this thread) and it's also not what the
ALT element was intended for.
That said, if you're using the ALT element to supply a caption for
your picture then it's very likely to be appropriate alternate text so
it's not much of a problem.
Personally, I wish the W3C had developed a caption tag to associate
appropriate text to a specific object. There used to be one for
tables, if memory serves, but it's not part of the current standards.
It would be nice if there was something that worked along similar
lines as the label tag for forms where you can definitively define a
piece of text as being a label for a form input.
Didn't mean to harp on this point too much but I used to work in an
environment where everything had to be designed with text-only
browsing in mind so I'm still pretty picky when it comes to standards
compliance in web design. The fact that so many browsers (mainly IE
and Netscape) completely ignore the standards (or only partly
implement them) has pretty much meant that most people have no idea
what the standards really are and they just design around how the
browser renders the code (and hopefully check it in multiple
browsers). I stopped playing that game a long time ago and just desing
my site using fully compliant XHTML 1.1 code and CSS for the layout.
But I do a fairly minimalist design so when stuff breaks it's not a
big deal.
==============================================
List usage info: http://www.zuikoholic.com
List nannies: olympusadmin@xxxxxxxxxx
==============================================
|