Konqueror - no ALT-Tag display

[David P James]

On Mon 14 June 2004 03:10, Andreas Pour wrote:
> Gavin Hamill wrote:
> > On Sun, Jun 13, 2004 at 11:45:08PM +0200, J?rgen Hochwald wrote:
> > > I saw the problem on www.wetterarchiv.de (click on a date in the
> > > column 'die letzten meldungen' to get the list). Here all symbols
> > > have (lage) alt-tags to display additional information for the
> > > symbol. I find it a great manko that this information ist not
> > > displayed. Possibe the Internet Expoder is displaying this for
> > > impotant information besides it is not HTML-konform.
> >
> > Your theory regarding IE is correct.
> >
> > The intended purpose of the ALT tag is to provide a
> > text-description alternative for the displayed image. Using it for
> > a "Pop-up Tool Tip" is blatantly incorrect
>
> Which is not quite correct.  If you care to support older browsers,
> you might look at the standard for HTML 3.2, at
> http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html32#img .  You can see that the "ALT" tag
> is "used to provide a text description of the image and is vital for
> interoperability with speech-based and text only user agents." So the
> only requirement is that it provides a text description of the image.
>  If a client browser wishes to place it also in a popup, there is
> absolutely nothing wrong with that.

That's true, but in Mr. Hochwald's example that calls for a title and 
not an alt tag since the contents of that tag are providing additional 
info as opposed to describing the image itself.

>
> As to the latest HTML, 4.01, it is not at all true that using ALT in
> a popup is incorrect.  See
> http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/objects.html#alternate-text and
> compare to http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/global.html#title .
>
> Indeed, IMO Konqueror (as well as Mozilla) has a very important
> feature missing in that it does not display the ALT tag in a popup
> window (though if there is a title attribute available I can see
> preferring that).

I generally agree with you here and title should take precedence.

>
> > and not only shows ignorance on behalf of lazy
> > web developers,
>
> Lazy?  Personally, I don't see the point of having both "ALT" and
> "TITLE".  On the websites I have created they always say the same
> thing and I have to waste developer resources, bandwidth and download
> time to repeat the same thing twice.  Why generate / send the same
> text twice?  Being efficient != being lazy, and the method works for
> the other browsers (most developers don't test w/ Konqueror or
> Mozilla and I don't see why web designers should redesign thousands
> of websites when adding this feature to the browser is far easier).
>
> > but also makes so many websites inaccessible to the many
> > web users who are partially sighted or those who must rely totally
> > on screen readers.
>
> Please read again the HTML 4.01 spec:
>
>   Specifying alternate text assists users without
>   graphic display terminals, users whose browsers
>   don't support forms, visually impaired users,
>   those who use speech synthesizers, those who
>   have configured their graphical user agents
>   not to display images, etc.
>
> http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/objects.html#alternate-text.  The
> ALT attribute is meant for this purpose, *not* the TITLE attribute.
>
> And the ALT attribute is meant also for the purpose of users "who
> have configured their graphical user agents not to display images,
> etc."  It is not at all clear to me, why in all but rare cases this
> text should be different from the "TITLE" attribute, and hence if the
> TITLE attribute is not present why the ALT attribute should not
> receive the same attention.  If someone indeed wants the popup to
> differ from the ALT description, they can add a different TITLE tag,
> but, again, it is a waste to include the same information twice.

Yes, it is a waste to include the same information twice, but the two 
tags shouldn't usually be containing the same info either. One is for a 
description, the other is for a caption or additional info. But writing 
descriptions of an image is actually quite difficult to do concisely 
and is not really done much (it's not enough to say a photo is of a 
Christmas tree, but rather how big it is, what sort of ornaments it 
has, where it is located and all manner of other things that may well 
be obvious visually. See [1] for an example of this). I generally 
prefer the title attribute since it is common with hyperlinks, tables 
and all sorts of other things. To me the alt attribute is the wasteful 
one because it often does end up being the same as the title yet I 
don't think text browsers display the title of an image, which is 
arguably a flaw in those browsers (they should display both, with the 
alt/description first followed by the title/caption preceded by 
"Caption:"), so you end up dumping extra stuff into the alt tag that 
properly belongs in the title tag.

[1] http://david.jamesnet.ca/aboutme.html

One of the biggest alt/title ironies is that of the  W3C images, which 
come with an alt tag ("Valid [.]!") but not a title tag even though the 
alt tag's content is more appropriately that of the title tag (the alt 
tags should be "W3C CSS" etc).


-- 
David P James
Ottawa, Ontario
http://david.jamesnet.ca
ICQ: #42891899, Jabber: davidpjames at jabber.org

If you've lost something, you had to lose it, not loose it.
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