IDEA: Tags within the ALT="" text...

   Like most people, I want my pages to look very good. I spend a lot of 
time making the graphics look smooth and clear, and laying them out just 
right so that the page has a good design. However, I also want my pages 
to look decent on a text browser such as Lynx or Charlotte.
   There are many things I can do to make it so that my pages, while 
looking good on Graphics browsers, still come accross looking good on 
text-only browsers. One of the ways I can do this is with the ALT="" 
section of the <IMG> tag. There is no reason why I cannot even put <IMG 
SRC="..." ALT=" "> so that people with text browsers will simply see 
nothing at a place where an image is instead of seeing [INLINE] or 
[IMAGE] (not only very ugly but it makes the pages difficult to read.
   However, there is a serious limitation with the ALT="" section of IMG. 
IT DOES NOT ALLOW ME TO PUT HTML TAGS WITHIN IT. This would be useful for 
many reasons. For instance, say I have a graphic banner on my page which 
is aligned to the left so that the title of the page can appear to the 
right of it. Now on a text browser, even if I put ALT="U of L" in the 
Image tag, the browser will see:

U of L Title

instead of:

U of L
Title

  Now, all we would have to do would be to allow tags within the ALT text 
so that I could do something like this:

<IMG SRC="uoflbanner.gif" ALT="U of L<P>">

   Wouldn't that be nice? Or, say the graphic banner included the title 
of the page so that I would want the ALT text to be the title. It would 
be great if I could put:

<IMG SRC="about-uofl.gif" ALT="<H1>About U of L</H1>">

   This way a text browser would get the title as a level 1 header.

   What does everyone think?
                                                          ////
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 Daniel G. Delaney (Dionysos)                    |  Louisville Times  |
 University Publications (Univ. of Lou.)         |       Chorus       |
    Computer Coordinator                         | ooooO        Ooooo |
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Received on Thursday, 9 May 1996 10:52:05 UTC