Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 12/18/05 10:00

"Curtis" <nospam@nohow.not> wrote:

> We're in the final stages of writing a markup language.

Really? Why? It's difficult to see what you are really trying to accomplish.
It sounds you have some sort of preprocessing that generates HTML. Well,
that's fine, as long as you produce HTML that is both syntactically and
semanttically correct.

> In the PHP code we have a <p ... style=\"==para==\"

Poor idea. Generate <p class="funny"> instead, and use an external style
sheet with p.funny { ... }.

> .==para==width: 50%; padding: 10px; color: navy;

Your CSS is far from exemplary. Setting padding in pixels (instead of the em
unit) and setting color without setting background, as well as making non-
link text some variant of blue, are typical symptoms of having missed the
essentials of CSS.

> So here's the problem: today we're finishing the code for
> links, images, etc. Images are a big deal for this
> application, and **one vital feature is the mouseover ALT
> text.**

Then the design is all wrong. If mouseover events are vital, the page is
broken by design. To begin with, there might be no mouse, or the user might
be physically unable to move it around with sufficient accuracy.

> We have it in the <IMG ... ALT="Witty description" of
> course.

Again broken by design. The ALT attribute shall specify the text to be
presented when the image is not presented. It specifies the textual
ALTernative.

> Feedback and suggestions most definitely appreciated.

Backtrack to the point where you started thinking you will use mouseover
texts for something vital. Then take another path.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html

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