William Knechtel writes: > Since Mozilla doesn't show a "broken image" when it can't find the > referenced image
This is true only in some circumstances. In other circumstances you will get some indication that an image ought to be there. It so happens that the things which cause an indication to appear are also desirable for other reasons. The first thing that causes an indication of a broken image is if height and width are specified. Then you see an empty box of the appropriate size. It is VERY desirable that, where possible, image sizes are given because in Mozilla it stops that horrible jumping around as it gets enough of the image to figure out the size, and in other browsers that need to know the image size before they can render anything after the image it allows the text of the page to render more quickly. Yes, I realize that if people wish to have custom images on a per-domain basis using clever tricks then they're stuck with a fixed size, but I can live with that even if they can't. The second thing that causes an indication of a broken image is if you give alt text (in Mozilla the alt text appears as plain body text which is not ideal but better than nothing). Alt text is a very, very, very good idea, especially for those who are visually-impaired, for those who turn off image download because they're on very slow connections and for those of us who think Lynx is a great browser. Even if the alt text is hard-wired English rather than using the language substitution mechanism, that would be better than nothing (at least for spotting that the images are missing). Note also that both the US and the UK, as well as other countries, have laws requiring that websites are accessible to those with disabilities like visual impairment, so this is an issue that needs to be addressed. Oh, the language substitution stuff reminds me of something... From the change log it appears that there was once the intention of having language-specific image directories but it appears that this didn't actually make it into the code. Has this idea been dropped permanently or forgotten about or what? -- Paul Allen Softflare Support
