The fact that they used title smacks of windows.
There is no truth to that at all.
Yes, it would be nice to be able to handle title, but this is a hack at best.
In actual fact, the title attribute associated with href is part of the formal HTML specifications dating back several years. well supported by user agents, and fairly common. The judicious use of the title attribute is actually a recognized best practice, the very opposite of hack.
I just added the word assistance after energy in the link and it works fine but of course, it will probably break their branding.
Of course that works, the word energy is, after all, just plain text. I suspect the designer didn't feel their was visually room for the second word, and that is why the extra information was put in the title attribute, a quite reasonable thing to do.
ask him to fix the alt tag on the link
Links do not have alt attributes. You are likely to confuse the web master with such a non sequitur. The alt tag on the image near the link in question is weak but acceptable.
But, I agree that very few web pages use title attributes.
If by "very few" you mean less than half, you are correct. But there are literally millions of pages that use title attributes correctly, so your characterization is not accurate.
generally it's the alt tags that have the text for the image.
As opposed to what? Are you referring to images with title attribute?
