TIDY - Objects to euro symbol (?) & very pedestrian about ALT for gifs

Hello again,


EURO SYMBOL PROBLEMS
======================

Tidy.exe, Version 13 Jan 2000 objects to the 'euro' symbol which is part of
...

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;" charset="windows-1252">

The HTML tags it is objecting to are:-

<b>EUR</b>


The message given is:-
Warning: replacing illegal character code 128

It correctly replaces the euro symbol with <b>&euro;</b> so no harm is
actually caused.

Follow this URL for more information on the euro symbol and windows-1252 ...

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/euro/symbol.asp


IMAGE & ALT
===========
I can fully accept the rational of using ALT with images that are associated
with hyperlinks or cause actions for forms, etc.
However I and thousands of other HTML authors use single transparant pixel
GIF images (typically named 1.gif) to control table layouts. The width and
height attributes of the image are used to force a fixed amount of
horizontal or vertical space when the overall table is working in
percentages as most browsers will not correctly render a mix of percentages
and pixel dimensions. 

Whilst I will grant you there may be better and perhaps more modern
approaches to controlling table layouts there are literally millions of HTML
pages that use this technique. It will be far too costly for everyone to be
forced to edit them over such an innane issue. It seems pedestrian in the
extreme that such invisible graphic images should be required to have an
alt="something" attribute. HTML is verbose enough without adding this sort
of overhead which will only add to the world-wide-wait.

Regards,

William C. Dickinson, MD
Integrated e-Business Services Ltd
Station Road, Worstead
North Walsham, Norfolk
NR28 9SA - England

T: +44 1692 404086
E: wcd@iebsl.co.uk

Received on Saturday, 29 April 2000 23:01:12 UTC