No alts in firefox?

[Steve Pugh]

You have no need to read the specs (recommendations)? Or are you saying
you're a genius and have learned the recommendations thoroughly?

How much of a genius do you need to be to know what the section on alt
attributes says?

And nowhere does it say that alt must not be presented as a tooltip,
nor does it say that alt must not be made available to users who can,
in theory, see the image.

No, you just said that it's handy that alt is used as a tooltip.

Not quite. He said that it's useful that the alt is presented as a
tooltip. He did not say that it was useful to use alt to create a
tooltip.

It isn't;

Actually it is.
It allows users to see alt attributes which are too large to fit into
the dimensions of the image box.
It allows users to see alt attributes which might be obscured by
overlapping elements (i.e. one of Miranda's layered image designs, or
any design were the imag dimensions are extended to allow for the case
above).
It allows users who have loaded the image but whose eyesight isn't
good enough to see what it is, to see the alt attribute (think small
icons).

Accessibility guidelines recommend that browsers make the alt
attribute available to all users - even if the image is loaded.
Showing the alt attribute as a tooltip is one way to do that.
Is it the best way? That's open to debate.

it's incorrect

It's incorrect based on a literal interpretation of the word
ALTernative. But it's not forbidden by any spec.

and as someone else said, annoying to have to put
in all those alt="" to get rid of something that shouldn't be there in
the first place.

Presumably you meant title="" not alt="".
And most people don't do that because most people are not so control
freak as to lose sleep over whether a few extra tooltips appear.

Again, if I have to explain, you wouldn't understand.

You don't understand.

Nowhere did jake say that alt should be used by authors to create
tooltips. All he said was that it was sometimes handy as a user to be
to able to access the alternative text as a tooltip.

That's fine, that's the very essence of accessibilty - it's giving the
user the ability to see more than one version of the content.

The problem is with the designers who see the tooltips and write alt
attributes solely to be seen as tooltips - i.e. they are not
alternatives to the images. That is wrong. But if the alt attribute is
an alternative then it doesn't matter if it's presented as a tooltip -
that's just one more way to access the information.

Yes, it's unfortunate that IE chose this way to make the alt
accessible (but is the Mozilla way of right clicking on an image a
selecting an option from a menu any better? Think about the user with
poor eyesight and small icons again) and yes it is abused. But as IE6
will be around for many years to come there's not much chance of
changing that.

The core thing to do is to write appropriate alt attributes and to
correct those authors who think that alt is for creating tooltips. You
seem to have mistakenly assumed that jake was one of those when from
what I can see he isn't.

Steve

 

[Travis Newbury]

As I told Jake, you'd never borrow my tools.

Actually I never borrow anything because I really suck at returning
things. So you have made the best decision.

Thanks Travis. Yes, my tastes are more functional than fancy which
leaves my stuff a bit on the bland side.

Bland is not bad, it is ony different. And as soon as either the
graphics people learn to play nice, or the developers learn to design
the entire web will be better off.

Starting next week, I'll be
teaching a class on advanced web design where, along with my class, I'll
be learning a lot of the fancier stuff. I haven't felt the need for any
of it so far, but who knows? Maybe I'll add some fancy stuff and liven
up some of my sites a bit.

I am glad you saw my comment for what it was. I teach Flash to several
companies in Atlanta, LA, and New York. But my favorite job was
teaching computer science with Central Texas's Okinawa campus in the
late 90's. Teaching is a very rewarding position.

On another note, I've been reading some of your posts and see that
unlike many, you are taking the criticism you've gotten and using it
constructivly. Learning is a good thing.

I deal mainly with Web applications so I do not have the same worries
about accessibility that the Web has. But I do like t learn about it.

 

[Frank Vanhoof]

As I told Jake, you'd never borrow my tools.


Thanks Travis. Yes, my tastes are more functional than fancy which
leaves my stuff a bit on the bland side. Starting next week, I'll be
teaching a class on advanced web design where, along with my class, I'll
be learning a lot of the fancier stuff. I haven't felt the need for any
of it so far, but who knows? Maybe I'll add some fancy stuff and liven
up some of my sites a bit.

On another note, I've been reading some of your posts and see that
unlike many, you are taking the criticism you've gotten and using it
constructivly. Learning is a good thing.

If you want to see where uncle pirates website stands out look at source
code. His HTML is neatly formatted and easy to read. It's a great
example of what well written HTML should like.
Keeping your code neat makes it easier to maintain and easier for others
to maintain. Maintainability is also why you should be writing the HTML
to the W3C spec. So others know what to expect when they have to look at
your source or maintain it in the future.


Frank Vanhoof
http://www.frankvanhoof.com
(e-mail address removed)
Software Engineer NSWCCD

 

[Andy Dingley]

Quite a smart decision IMO.

Bad decision. IMHO, for two reasons:

Firstly, it breaks the standard, albeit a de facto standard. _You_
might not like IE, but the web is a public medium - there's a lot of
people out there who use it, and who have become used to how it works.
Firefox shouldn't mess with their expectations without a good reason.
This isn't a question of interpreting standards, it's a question of
user familiarity.

Secondly there's the standards issue. IE's tooltip behaviour wasn't
required by the standard, but nor was it wrong. It wasn't perhaps the
best interpretation (it should make better use of the title
attribute), but it's reasonable. Where IE was obviously broken (such
as the CSS box model) then it's reasonable for Firefox to correct this
behaviour, despite the consequences for compatibility. In the case of
alt/title though, there's no such standards-based argument for
becoming so different from IE's behaviour.

What both Firefox and IE should do is to present title as a pop-up, if
present (the Firefox behaviour). If it's not present, but alt is
present, then alt should be presented instead (the IE behaviour).
This operates as a "best of both worlds" solution (not even a
compromise) and presents no problem to authors. I hope that at least
one will fix itself.

What authors should now do is to update their pages (sadly so, but
it's necessary to give Firefox users an equal experience). As well as
checking that images have an alt text, we should now go through and
check that they also have a title attibute, should one be relevant. Of
course this is something that good design had done anyway, but it's
pretty rare. If alt is set to an empty string (the "eye candy"
value), title should generally be omitted, rather than set to an empty
string.

 

[Noozer]

Firstly, it breaks the standard, albeit a de facto standard. _You_

might not like IE, but the web is a public medium - there's a lot of
people out there who use it, and who have become used to how it works.
Firefox shouldn't mess with their expectations without a good reason.
This isn't a question of interpreting standards, it's a question of
user familiarity.

IE is broken. Just because it does something and the majority of folks use
it doesn't make it correct.

"ALT" is short for ALTERNATE... Either show the GRAPHIC or show the TEXT,
not both.

 

[C A Upsdell]

Bad decision. IMHO, for two reasons:

Firstly, it breaks the standard, albeit a de facto standard.

FYI, IE has supported TITLE -- the proper attribute -- for a long, long
time, so in recent years it has been only sloppy designers who use ALT
wrongly and so create problems.

Also FYI, the standard is established by the W3C, of which Microsoft is
a member.

_You_

might not like IE, but the web is a public medium - there's a lot of
people out there who use it, and who have become used to how it works.
Firefox shouldn't mess with their expectations without a good reason.

Conforming with standards is a good reason, as it reduces the cost of
making sites while helping to ensure cross-browser predictability.

As for people becoming used to how browsers act: if designers had
started out using TITLE when it was first supported by IE, there would
be no problem. So it is not Firefox creating a problem: it is sloppy
designers creating a problem.

What both Firefox and IE should do is to present title as a pop-up, if
present (the Firefox behaviour). If it's not present, but alt is
present, then alt should be presented instead (the IE behaviour).
This operates as a "best of both worlds" solution (not even a
compromise) and presents no problem to authors. I hope that at least
one will fix itself.

Opera goes one further. It lets the user decide whether to have ALTs
and/or TITLEs as tooltips: you can even pick both.

What authors should now do is to update their pages (sadly so, but
it's necessary to give Firefox users an equal experience).

Again, it is not Firefox creating a problem. It is sloppy -- or
incompetent -- designers who have created a problem.

As well as checking that images have an alt text, we should now go through and
check that they also have a title attibute, should one be relevant.

It would be reasonable for a lint type of tool to do this, optionally.

 

[Oli Filth]

Also FYI, the standard is established by the W3C, of which Microsoft is
a member.

Which is quite ironic, really, seeing as Microsoft's browser is the
least standards-compliant of them all.

I would imagine Microsoft is a member of the W3C mainly so that they can
exert pressure and push their proprietary HTML stuff (or buggy
interpretations) into the standards.

 

[C A Upsdell]

Which is quite ironic, really, seeing as Microsoft's browser is the
least standards-compliant of them all.

I would imagine Microsoft is a member of the W3C mainly so that they can
exert pressure and push their proprietary HTML stuff (or buggy
interpretations) into the standards.

Actually, if you review the history of browsers, you will note that IE4,
IE5, IE5.5, and IE6 were the most standards-compliant browsers of
their times. Unfortunately Microsoft issues new versions of IE with new
versions of Windows, and since there have been no new versions of
Windows since XP, further improvements in IE standards must await
Longhorn, which will appear LONG after XP appeared.

So IE6 only looks bad because other browsers have kept on improving
while IE has stalled.

 

[Toby Inkster]

Opera [...] lets the user decide whether to have ALTs and/or TITLEs as
tooltips: you can even pick both.

I think it did in some 5.x version or something, but I don't think it does
any more. (Or if it does, it's an ini-file setting, there is no GUI
preference for it.)

Opera displays the TITLE attribute only for images.

 

[C A Upsdell]

C A Upsdell wrote:

Opera [...] lets the user decide whether to have ALTs and/or TITLEs as
tooltips: you can even pick both.

I think it did in some 5.x version or something, but I don't think it does
any more. (Or if it does, it's an ini-file setting, there is no GUI
preference for it.)

Damn, you're right. I remember finding it useful to enable both ALT and
TITLE tooltips for testing pages. Sigh.