- From: Sander Tekelenburg <st@isoc.nl>
- Date: Mon, 30 Jul 2007 03:50:05 +0200
- To: public-html@w3.org
At 09:52 -0400 UTC, on 2007-07-29, Gregory J. Rosmaita wrote: > lachlan wrote, quote: >> The alt attribute is only rendered as a tooltip in IE, and >> that's considered a bug for a variety of reasons. See this article. >> >> http://hixie.ch/advocacy/alt-tooltips > unquote > > i find hixie's arguments, decidedly unconvincing. there ARE valid > reasons why @alt and @title should be exposed to the user Agreed. > onMouseOver Disagreed :) How @alt is presented is up to the UA. A tooltip is nothing more than one possible implementation[*]. If that implementation satisfies the need for @alt as defined in the spec, that's fine. When it doesn't, the implementation is broken. @alt marks not a tooltip, it marks a textual equivalent. That's all. [*] Lynx and iCab for Mac OS 9 for instance provide access to @alt, but not through tooltips. > -- as i indicated, what you perceive as a logical icon > may not be understood by a sighted visitor from a vastly different > culture, so a tooltip exposition of ALT text is actually beneficial > to users of all stripes. Providing easy access to the equivalent is beneficial. Whether that is done through mechanism x or y is irrelevant, as long as it gets the job done. > in the end, all hixie really addressed is > author complaints Well, I wouldn't dismiss the usability/accessibility problems he notes. But yes, the article is about broken implementations (in UAs), not about the alt attribute (in the HTML spec). -- Sander Tekelenburg The Web Repair Initiative: <http://webrepair.org/>
Received on Monday, 30 July 2007 02:00:04 UTC