[thelist] differences in alt vs. title attributes and <h#> tags

[martin.p.burns at uk.pwcglobal.com]

Memo from Martin P Burns of PricewaterhouseCoopers

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To:   "Thelist (E-mail)" <thelist at lists.evolt.org>
Subject:  [thelist] differences in alt vs. title attributes and <h#> tags


Hi Bob

The key thing is to think semantically - what does an attribute *mean*...
behaviour should follow that.

>NN 6.2 doesn't seem to recognize the alt="what I'm writing" but does
>recognize title="what I'm writing" and MSIE 5.5 recognizes both. Is it
more
>or less compliant to current HTML standards to use either or both within
the
>same tag line? I'm guessing title is more so because it's recognized in
both
>browsers.

What alt means is the alternative text description - what you need if you
can't
see the image. This should be a description of what the image depicts. So
if you're doing an alt for a photo:
http://www.easyweb.co.uk/pics/cuba/011.jpg
it would read something like:
"Closeup of hands rolling a cigar from tobacco on a wooden block."
Or for a logo or icon:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/furniture/nav/lhs_sitepuffs/sport.gif
you might represent the text of the image:
"BBC Sport"

What title means is the title of the image - what does it mean or do?
So for the first image above, your title might be:
"Cigar roller in Cuban cigar factory"
and in the second:
"Link to BBC Sport"

>I've also written some CSS to later include as a .css file when I'm
>finalizing but have noticed that for instance the <h2>what I'm
writing</h2>
>shows up as a rather bold look to it which is fine but NN 6.2 does not
have
>a bold tone to it. Is this because I'm controlling the <h2></h2> tags
>through CSS properties or is this just how NN renders the font?.

If you're controlling through CSS, this shouldn't be an issue for you.
They'll
be much the same on all CSS-obedient browsers.

Cheers
Martin


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