[thelist] alt "tags" WAS: Restaurant websites?

[Christian Heilmann]

>>>
>>> When I feed the url in the W3C validator, it shows up as valid XHTML 
>>> 1.0 Transitional (which is what the doctype specifies). And all of 
>>> the images on the home page at least have correct Alt tags that are 
>>> descriptive and match the images.
>>>
>> Alt attributes, please don't talk about tags that don't exist. 
>> Especially when attacking or defending the technicalities of a web site.
>
>
> Quite correct, of course. It is an attribute not a tag. That being 
> said, Alt tag is a common usage, people know what I mean and was the 
> phrase used in the message I was replying to. Your reply, while 
> certainly correct, seemed a bit on the percussive side.

Not meant personally, just an opportunity:

/<tip type="accessibility awareness" author="Chris Heilmann">/

"Alt tag is a common usage, people know what I mean and was the phrase 
used in the message I was replying to."
Common usage doesn't make it a proper way of communication. Sticking to 
the proper terms and descriptions makes it a lot easier to explain 
standards and help people to help themselves by looking up the term in 
documents later on 
(http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=alt+attributes+for+images brings up a 
lot more quality results than 
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=alt+tags+for+images).
The false use of  "alt tag" give non-techie clients the impression that 
it is "an HTML coder problem" and not part of the web site content. When 
handing over a project for maintenance it has to be clear that for every 
image  used in a product there needs to be a textual alternative, which 
is an attribute of that image, same as the width and the height is.
By explaining alt as an alternative text and an attribute of the image, 
we make accessibility a lot easier to grasp. The term "tag" has not any 
meaning outside our own webdev environment (XML,clothing and children's 
games excluded) and makes it "dark magic of web design" that clients 
don't have to care about, but pay us to do instead. This is one reason 
why there are so many web sites with bad alternative text.
Furthermore, it binds that text to an element, and avoids confusion with 
real elements. ALT is no element, but TITLE for example could be both an 
element and an attribute. You don't read  much about "title tags for 
links" funnily enough...
</tip>