Re: Line Breaks for ALT=TEXT

Mike Paciello asks

> Is it possible to force a line break or carriage return when 
> using the ALT= attribute for images?

No

> I've tried imbedding <br>'s or
> forcing <pre>'s, but that doesn't work.

The contents of alt is a string, not a (sub) document. You can't put 
any markup or other formatting in there. This is a known limitation.

The same dumb limitation looks like being written into the client side 
imagemap proposal which spyglass, netscape and microsoft are implementing 
- alt text instead of real marked up text (as provided by Dave Ragett's 
much superior FIG proposal (the real one, not the one in the INSERT draft).

> I want to force the line break because in some instances, providing lengthy
> text descriptions of an image for the visually impaired is required. However,
> from a visual appearance, the test flies right off the browser window.

... in some browser X. Split the problkem into two parts:

1) the HTML 2.0 spec inherits a design flaw from Mosaic such that you 
can't put markup into textual alternatives. This we are stuck with,
and look like repeating.

2) (some browser) does not do line wrapping correctly with long alt text 
strings. They probably never tested alt longer than say 80 characters. This
is readilly fixable by the browser vendor in question.


-- 
Chris Lilley, Technical Author and JISC representative to W3C 
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Received on Friday, 16 February 1996 15:28:56 UTC