[thelist] alt tags

aardvark roselli at earthlink.net
Tue Jul 23 13:14:11 CDT 2002


> From: "Tom Dell'Aringa" <pixelmech at yahoo.com>

first off... they're *attributes*, not tags...

sorry, but i had to say that...

> In IE the alt tag shows up as a title. Is this standard across
> browsers? I want to say somebody said something about the right
> click. What if you would need to use like 30-40 characters in your alt
> text - but the title box that pops up obscures something else? For
> non-impaired users, that is quite annoying.

in many versions of IE, alt attributes appear as tooltips (or balloon
help)...  this has widely been regarded as a bad idea...

title attributes are now what are supposed to appear in tooltips, and
alt attributes are to quietly wait until a browser with images
disabled or without image capability comes along before they can
strut their stuff...

use 'title' for now, and leave the 'alt' as it should be... a blank title
attribute will cause later versions of IE to show no tooltip, as they
now defer to the title attribute over alt (if one is provided, even if it's
blank)...


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