Posted by Charles Sweeney on 10/01/86 11:24

GreyWyvern wrote

> Charles Sweeney <me@charlessweeney.com> wrote:
>
>> I disagree. The alt text should describe the picture. If the image
>> is a logo, I want to know it's a logo.
>
> Yesh, that is what the "title" attribute is for.

The title does not show up when I have images off, unless I hover over
the alt text! Which is bloody pointless having to hover all over a page
to see if there's an image there! Simply stating in the alt text that
it's an image, shows up every time, and tells me quickly that there is
an image there, and gives me a brief description of it.

Why do w3c people always insist on making life hard for the surfer?

> The obvious alt text
> for a logo would be the name of the company/organization it
> represents.

The obvious alt text would be "company name logo".

> This is the *function* of alt text, it's not up for
> debate.

The function of alt text is to provide text that replaces an image. The
wording of that text is entirely up to the webmaster.

> The fact that current browsers *cough*MSIE*cough* mishandle
> it by treating it the same as a "title" attribute will not be the
> case forever.

With images off, IE doesn't treat alt text the same as the "title"
attribute. It displays the alt text, but does not display the title
unless you hover over the alt text. Firefox is just the same. For
surfing without images, the "title" attribute is of no practical use.

>> Tell me this, if the picture is of a man getting presented with a
>> cheque, what alt text would you use? I would use something like
>> "Picture of Mr A receiving a cheque from Mr B". What's wrong with
>> that?
>
> That's not bad alt text, for a photograph.

Glad you agree.

>>> Also, setting alt text to "" is not just to get the page to validate
>>> but rather to say to the user-agent that if the image cannot or is
>>> not displayed then the suitable alt text is "", ie. the image has no
>>> meaning other than as eye-candy and can be safely ignored by the
>>> user.
>>
>> I wouldn't use the alt attribute in such a case. If you must use it,
>> then "meaningless image" would be better.
>
> Huh? So if someone is surfing your website with images off, you'd
> rather see this:
>
> +-----------------+ +-----------------+
>|meaningless image|Welcome to my website!|meaningless image|
> +-----------------+ +-----------------+
>
> ... than this:
>
> Welcome to my website!
>
> ???
>
> Whatever floats your boat, I guess.

As you said, one might have one's own reasons for wanting to know if
there's an image there or not. One might also want to know if it's a
meaningless image or not. Personally I would not use any alt text for a
meaningless image, which is why I suggested that user agents should, in
such cases, ignore the image.

>>> If no
>>> alt text was given, however, the user-agent may choose to display
>>> the word "image" or even "image.ext", which is less than helpful and
>>> may lead the user to think that the image was actual content, or
>>> worse still it would litter the page with the word "image" making it
>>> difficult to read.
>>
>> In which case they should get a better user agent. If the picture
>> cannot be displayed, and there is no alt text, the agent should
>> ignore it.
>
> Just like you "want to know it's a logo", I'd like to know if there
> were any images supposed to be on the site which didn't load. This
> is especially good while developing. Thus I am happy that Opera
> replaces broken images with:
>
> +-----+
>|Image|
> +-----+

Yesh. In which case you might get |image|Welcome to my website|image|.
Whatever floats your boat as you say.

> ... rather than hiding them against my wishes. If I feel that the
> image is not worth even this bit of display, I can give it alt=""
> which allows the browser to assume with confidence that the image is
> not worth a textual representation of any kind.

Firefox (haven't checked other browsers) allows the alt text to over-
ride the "title" attribute. If alt="", the title is not shown, and does
not show when hovering over the place where the image would be. (with
images off)

I don't think it's right that one attribute should over-ride another.

For me it would make sense (with images off) to ignore any image that
does not have alt text or a title. If the webmaster wants people to
know there is an image there, he should provide alt text stating what
the image is, and give a brief description of it. The "title" attribute
being next to useless in this case.

--
Charles Sweeney
http://CharlesSweeney.com

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