P
Paul Furman
There is no such thing right?
<a href="thispage.htm" alt="this page">click here</a>
<a href="thispage.htm" alt="this page">click here</a>
D
David Dorward
Paul said:
Text to display in the event that the link can't be displayed? No, there
isn't - it wouldn't make sense.
Of course, you probably don't understand what alt is really all about, and
what you really want to do is entirely achievable.
Have a read of http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/alt/alt-text.html
A
Andreas Prilop
Paul Furman said:
"Click here" is bullshit anyway.
<http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/noClickHere>
So write <a href="thispage.html">this page</a> or
<a href="thispage.html" title="that page">this page</a>
with the TITLE attribute.
I
Inger Helene Falch-Jacobsen
Paul said:
Guess you are thinking about "title":
<a href="thispage.htm" title="this page">click here</a>
G
GD
Paul Furman said:
No, and you shouldn't be using the alt attribute for what you're doing
with images! The TITLE attribute is for displaying tooltips, it's wrong
that MSIE shows you the alt text like this. Other browsers like Mozilla
and Opera will not show users the alt text when they hover over the
image.
Also, don't use 'click here' as link text! Use something more
sensible/meaningful.
<img
src="file.gif"
alt="This is meaningful alternative text for when the image isn't displayed"
title="This is complimentary text that the user (usually) sees in a tooltip"
Thank goodness for <a href="http://www.w3.org/" title="The W3C website,
part of the MSN network™">web standards</a>!
The above examples will display text when you hover and still make sense
to everyone from blind users to people with modern standards-orientated
browsers
T
Toby A Inkster
Andreas said:
I think "this page" is almost as bad as "click here".
P
Paul Furman
David said:
I understand alt as substitute text for when the image doesn't display.
Is [title="Joe's page"] incorrect, as a tool-tip generator?
P
Paul Furman
Andreas said:
Great thanks!
So many basic things I don't know.
The "click here" was just for demonstration but that's a good
explanation of a more logical syntax.
A
Augustus
Paul Furman said:
you want to use TITLE instead of ALT
A
Andreas Prilop
Toby A Inkster said:
If you take "this page" literally, of course! You snipped away my
title="that page", which is nonsense also when taken literally.
I assumed that you substitute *real expressions* for the dummy
"thispage.html", "this page", "that page" - for example:
<a href="http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/nhtcapri/arabic-alphabet.html6"
title="The Infidel's Guide to The Arabic Alphabet"
charset="ISO-8859-6">The Arabic Alphabet</a>
E
Eric Bohlman
And for the same reason: it says nothing about what makes that link
different from any other link on the page. Visual users skim for links
almost unconsciously; text-to-speech users can hear a list of links read or
tab between; users of modern browsers can get a sidebar or a popup showing
all the links coming off a page. If all the link texts say more or less
the same thing, the user is forced to read, rather than scan, the content
in order to find out where he wants to go next, slowing him down and
increasing the "cognitive load."
Link texts need to really stand out, which means not only that they should
be unique within a page, but they should be short and simple without any
"padding." For example, words like "available" should not appear in link
text because including them doesn't add any meaning; if a resource wasn't
available, you wouldn't be linking to it, now would you? Similarly,
"download" shouldn't appear in link text unless it's the only download link
on the page. "Here" should be completely avoided; the user already knows
that the resource is where it is rather than someplace else.
T
Toby A Inkster
Eric said:
Well, "click here" is bad for two reasons. "This page" is only bad for the
first of them.
1. "click here" does not describe what's on the other end of the link.
2. "click here" is not device-independent. It assumes the use of a mouse
or similar pointing device.
J
Jukka K. Korpela
Toby A Inkster said:
You can put it that way, but it really includes a large set of reasons,
see http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www/click.html
That's true.
But "This page" is bad for yet another reason: the pronoun "this"
normally refers to _this_, i.e. something that is immediately at hand,
such as the page on which the phrase "this page" occurs.
If you think that nobody could ever misunderstand it that way, you can
look forward to learning new features of the human mind. There is
absolutely nothing that cannot be misunderstood, and all communication
inevitably fails - though sometimes just partially, and by using
reasonable link texts we make the accidental successes more probable.
Since this originally resulted from the text of a dummy link, I think
the morale is: Be clever when writing dummy texts. Dummies can be
smart. And every time your write an example, you give an example.
So make it a good example.
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Google Uses Anchor Alt Attribute
Sounds like things may have changed since this posting in 2004. Check out paragraph 3 of the following link. Looks like it's beneficial for your Google listing to include the 'alt' attribute in an anchor tag.
Sounds like things may have changed since this posting in 2004. Check out paragraph 3 of the following link. Looks like it's beneficial for your Google listing to include the 'alt' attribute in an anchor tag.