[thelist] Netscape 7 and <alt>

Chris Kaminski chris at setmajer.com
Sun Jun 9 08:42:12 CDT 2002


Thus spake Sharon F. Malone:

> Well, excuse me. I sense a slam there as you mention "designers."

I sense someone needs some coffee. ;-)

> I went through months of Web Design school where I was taught to use ALT and
> not TITLE ... and I was taught using the NN4.x browser where ALT is also
> displayed as a "tool tip."

I've been through years of building Web sites professionally, and ALT has
always been, well, ALTernative text to be used in place of the images if
image loading is turned off, the UA cannot display images, etc.

That IE and NN decided to also use it as tooltip text is irrelevant.

> My teachers then have misled a lot of students along the way if this is the
> case.

They sure have. There have been recent threads on Webdesign-L, Outside the
Loop and CSS-Discuss on Web design training, and the general consensus was
that most classes were teaching 199x-browsers-are-all-broken,
<table>'n'<font> methodology, not the W3C standards. A few courses taught a
bit of both, as in "here's what works in IE 4+ and NN4+ Mac/Win and can be
done quickly and easily with the WYSIWYG, and here's how it's /supposed/ to
be done."

The upshot is that, per usual, what you learn in class isn't always the
whole story. Take American History in U.S. high schools, for example....

> According to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, Guideline 1 "Provide
> equivalent alternatives to auditory and visual content" only mentions:

<snip content="quote from WAI describing use of the alt attribute" />

> Nowhere do I see TITLE mentioned.

Of course not. Title is used for an image/link/etc. that *is* present. Alt
is a replacement. Different things.

> I'm sure there are a lot of "designers" who are and have been designers for
> some time who were doing what I was (emphasis: was) doing.

Prolly a lot more are just leaving both attributes off altogether. Doesn't
make it correct.

> I have included  TITLE in my more recent sites.

Cool. Problem solved, no?


chris.kaminski == ( design | code | analysis )

------------------------------------------------------------
    It is nothing short of a miracle that
    modern methods of instruction have not
    yet entirely strangled the holy
    curiousity of inquiry.
    -----------------------------------<< Albert Einstein >>




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