This is bad behavior and there has been lots of discussion on it.
Pretend you are blind.
There is a lovely image that says "Click here to format your hard drive" but
someone has made the Alt text say "CLICK ME!!!!"
The only thing you as a blind person see is CLICK ME!!!! so you click it.
The Alt text should reflect the content of the image, not be a tooltip.
There is another attribute, TITLE= that can be used for the tooltip and it
works on IE.
Victor Bien wrote:
> J. Robinson wrote:
>
> This is all good stuff but the "real world" as Molly Holzschlag puts
> it in her book "Using html 4" Que 2000, has been so influenced by M$'s
> IE, and its use of the Alt string in the way I described, that for a
> browser NOT to behave like that makes it *look* sub-standard. What a
> predicament!
>
> The statistics for a site I manage shows over 90% of the visitors use
> IE 5.x.
>
> Holzschlag stated that M$ was a more compliant member of W3C than
> Netscape (in the period relevant to her book). I therefore wonder how
> IE 6 behaves - haven't got around to trying it yet ...
>
> Victor Bien
>
> > This behaviour is actually per HTML spec for the alt tag (to quote):
> > "alt = text [CS]
> > For user agents that cannot display images, forms, or applets, this
> > attribute specifies alternate text. The language of the alternate text
> > is specified by the lang attribute.
> >
> > Several non-textual elements (IMG, AREA, APPLET, and INPUT) let
> > authors specify alternate text to serve as content when the element
> > cannot be rendered normally. Specifying alternate text assists users
> > without graphic display terminals, users whose browsers don't support
> > forms, visually impaired users, those who use speech synthesizers,
> > those who have configured their graphical user agents not to display
> > images, etc.
> >
> > The alt attribute must be specified for the IMG and AREA elements. It
> > is optional for the INPUT and APPLET elements.
> >
> > While alternate text may be very helpful, it must be handled with
> > care. Authors should observe the following guidelines:
> >
> > * Do not specify irrelevant alternate text when including images
> > intended to format a page, for instance, alt="red ball" would be
> > inappropriate for an image that adds a red ball for decorating a
> > heading or paragraph. In such cases, the alternate text should be the
> > empty string (""). Authors are in any case advised to avoid using
> > images to format pages; style sheets should be used instead.
> > * Do not specify meaningless alternate text (e.g., "dummy text").
> > Not only will this frustrate users, it will slow down user agents that
> > must convert text to speech or braille output.
> >
> > Implementors should consult the section on accessibility for
> > information about how to handle cases of omitted alternate text."
> > (
> > http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/struct/objects.html#h-1
> > 3.8 )
> >
> > There is instead another tag which is intended to be used in the way
> > we've been trained by other browsers; the "title" tag:
> > "title = text [CS]
> > This attribute offers advisory information about the element for which
> > it is set.
> >
> > Unlike the TITLE element, which provides information about an entire
> > document and may only appear once, the title attribute may annotate
> > any number of elements. Please consult an element's definition to
> > verify that it supports this attribute.
> >
> > Values of the title attribute may be rendered by user agents in a
> > variety of ways. For instance, visual browsers frequently display the
> > title as a "tool tip" (a short message that appears when the pointing
> > device pauses over an object). Audio user agents may speak the title
> > information in a similar context. For example, setting the attribute
> > on a link allows user agents (visual and non-visual) to tell users
> > about the nature of the linked resource:
> >
> > ..some text...
> > Here's a photo of
> > <A href="http://someplace.com/neatstuff.gif"; title="Me scuba diving">
> > me scuba diving last summer
> > </A>
> > ..some more text...
> > "
> > (
> > http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/struct/global.html#adef
> > -title )
> >
> > I had noticed this at first too... it's funny what we become
> > accustomed to and assume is "correct".
> >
> > Jeff
> >
> > On Thu, 3 Jan 2002 11:30:23, Victor Bien <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> > wrote:
> >
> >
> >> I'm not sure, but I think Alt text strings associated with images
> >>have stopped appearing.
> >>
> >>Victor Bien
> >>
> >>
> >
> >
![http://someplace.com/neatstuff.gif"](http://someplace.com/neatstuff.gif"){kind=link}