On Fri, 23 Dec 2005, Gérard Talbot wrote:
Alan J. Flavell a écrit :
I assume that this refers to IE's habit of displaying the alt text
as a popup, if no title= attribute is present?
Yes. This trick is mentioned at
http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/defaul...rogrammingBugs
but it's still a trick, a workaround that compensate for a wrong
implementation.
I basically agree. Surely the whole implication of the term
"alternative" is that the user should get /either/ the one /or/ the
other, at least as the default offering? Not both.
By coding title="", it's possible to disable that behaviour in
older IE versions, without (AFAIAA) doing any harm to other
browsers.
Well, I wish MSIE dev. team and Chris Wilson (and D. Massy) would
meet the spec and implement the spec as it should be.
I'd have no objection to providing a mechanism for a user to
deliberately request display of the alternative text, even though the
image is present and being displayed. I'm told that this can be
helpful for some types of cognitive deficit. What I'm objecting to is
the current *default* behaviour of IE (when no title= attribute is
present).
Btw, I don't have any ambitions to go participating in MSDN
discussions. If IE want to support the WWW, then there's no charge
for them to read and apply anything that they can learn from WWW
forums such as ciwah where such matters are discussed in the wider
context.
quoting D.Massy "...
acceptable use of the Alt attribute? I think it's an interesting
point but often having the tooltip can be a useful addition
especially when the image is a hyperlink.
....No, that's exactly what the title= attribute on the hyperlink is
meant for...
"Maybe it could be made an
optional thing if people find it annoying rather than helpful.
--Dave Massy"
Indeed my complaint is with the default behaviour. I would not object
to an option which gave access to the alt text, as I said above. In
fact, there are three texts to which access ought to be possible, and
I don't know of a browser which supports them all:
alt= - the alternative text for the image
title= of the image - short supplementary info about the image
title= of the enclosing <a href=...> - short details of what's at
the target of the link.
I note that some of the discussion at your cited URL seems to be
confusing the two title= attributes with each other.
As the discussion also shows (and it's been said countless times
before), the problem with non-serious HTML authors is that they won't
read the specifications, but rather they experiment with one or other
browser to find out what happens, and then draw their own conclusions
about what the intentions were. And the widespread, but wrong,
conclusion that they draw from IE is that the alt= attribute is
intended for producing tooltips. As the cited discussion says:
||The biggest problem with this is that amateur developers are using
||alt= instead of title= in which hurts the experience of people using
||competing browsers. [...]
which is exactly my point. While I suppose the easy answer to that is
that "authors should damned well RTFM, and not rely on the behaviour
of this or that particular browser - IE can't be held responsible for
the misguided beliefs of web authors", that's too facile an answer
IMHO, and IE could address this aspect as a useful side-effect of
reconsidering their default behaviour in the presence of an <img>
which has non-null alt= text and no title= attribute. At the same
time, they might give some thought to possible ways of accessing all
three of the texts mentioned above (via right-click, perhaps?).
And of course there's longdesc=, but I don't think we need to discuss
that in the present context.
cheers
