Putting on my semantic nit picker hat..... http://mark.gruden.com/WE04/WSGTalk-slide-12.htm http://mark.gruden.com/WE04/WSGTalk-slide-13.htm
alt and title are different. alt is there to express the meaning of the image when the image is NOT visible, when the image is visible alt is completely redundant. alt does NOT provide additional information - in theory it should provide the same information in an alternate (text) form. The title is there to provide supplementary/additional information, over and above what the image expresses. Whether there is a link around the image or not has no bearing on this. alt is required on images and title is optional but often useful. A title on the link should provide additional information about the link, not the image. So for example: <a href="me-and-my-cat_lge.jpg" title="hi-res version of the image"><img src="me-and-my-cat_sml.jpg" alt="Mark and his cat sitting happily by the sea" title="photo taken in Sydney on the 12th March 2004"></a> What users agents do with that information, how it is presented in IE5, Opera or XYZ browser has nothing to do with the semantic purpose of these attributes. Getting these two issues (semantic meaning and real world implementations) confused or discussing them as if they were one issue just creates a stack of confusion. The spec says: "Values of the title attribute may be rendered by user agents in a variety of ways". The title attribute != tool tip, a tool tip is one common way of representing a title attribute. Back in my box until friday night now... -- Mark Stanton Gruden Pty Ltd http://www.gruden.com ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
