Re: alt title and links

On Fri, 17 Aug 2001, Matt May wrote:

> is preferable to this:
>
> <a href="search.html" title="Search"><img src="magnifyingglass.gif" alt="a
> magnifying glass"></a>

But this is clearly suboptimal in terms of underlying principles, as
well as being less preferable subjectively as you say.  The purpose of
this image is to link to a search page, and so the _alt_ attribute of
the img should, in my estimation, be alt="Search".

The img _title_ could perfectly well be title="a magnifying glass",
since that is indeed a brief description of the image.

In this particular example, the title attribute of the a href, and
the alt attribute of the img, seem to be converging on the same thing,
which makes them seem redundant.  But it wouldn't always be as simple
as that.

best regards

Received on Sunday, 19 August 2001 10:41:32 UTC