APPLET AND ALT AND ALTERNATE CONTENT

Liam Wrote:
By the way, the April 13th draft mentions in numerous places that the
ALT attribute is required for APPLET.  This is not the case in any
version of HTML.

EDITORS COMMENTS
Correct. It is supported but not required.  We have fixed that.


ALSO

The discussions on the topic of ALT vs. Alternate Content have been
very interesting and are leading us to think that maybe we should say
in the guidelines that:
1) use of Alternate Content is the preferred way to make applets
accessible when not viewed.
2) for the sake of some old browsers, it is recommended that ALT text
ALSO be provided (in addition to but not instead of Alternate Content)
3) Note that the use of  APPLET in general is deprecated -  OBJECT
should be used.)

.

We are also interested in anyone who has any experience with how
different browsers handle and APPLET with both ALT text and Alternate
Content.    We tried a Java Applet element on Netscape 3.02 with Java
Applets turned off and found that it displayed the alternate content
but not the ALT text.

Specifically after viewing a fake applet which has both alt text and
alternate content
 http://trace.ie.wisc.edu/kaboodle/html/tests/applettest.html  ) in
netscape 1, 2.02, 3.01 and 4 and opera 3.1 with images not loaded and
java turned off (where applicable) the content of the APPLET element
is displayed.  DosLynx displays the alt-text followed by the content
of APPLET (which actually reads quite nicely).  The results on
Microsoft IE 4.01 are inconclusive as we couldn't tell for sure how to
turn applets off.  (It seemed to want to run the applet with all check
boxes unchecked.  How do you turn Applets off in IE 4.01?)

Therefore,  we are thinking that perhaps we should  REQUIRE using
content of APPLET no matter what (whether functional or
presentational) and RECOMMEND using "alt."

Your thoughts and comments on this?


The Editors

-- ------------------------------
Gregg C Vanderheiden Ph.D.
Professor - Human Factors
Dept of Ind. Engr. - U of Wis.
Director - Trace R & D Center
GV@tracecenter.org , http://tracecenter.org/
FAX 608/262-8848
For a list of our listserves send "lists" to listproc@tracecenter.org

Received on Tuesday, 14 April 1998 12:56:26 UTC