Re: can someone shed some light on this?

David and all,

I had heard that alt for <a> was listed as supported in html 4.0 but I
looked at the following for html 4.01 and see that it is not listed here.

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/objects.html#adef-alt
There has been a smattering of discussion of alt for links recently and yes,
but for using it as a tooltip, I do not understand the applicability of it
especially for text links.  We do however in jaws, support the rendering of
title for <a>

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Woolley" <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>
To: <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Sent: Saturday, October 04, 2003 4:17 AM
Subject: Re: can someone shed some light on this?



> I came across this and don't understand its purpose:
> http://www.google.comalt="Google">next</a>

I think you have lost a few characters in the transcription as this
is simply the illegal use of a greater-than character as presented here.
Assuming this was really:

<a href="http://www.google.com" alt="Google">next</a>

surely everyone "knows" (knows in quotes) that alt "tags" (tags in quotes)
are solely intended for the production of tool tips.  I assume that
the author wanted a tooltip and generalised the populuar understanding of
the purpose of the alt attribute to use it on an element that doesn't
actually allow it.

If that is right, they should have used title, which is not required
to produce a tool tip, but does have rather closer semantics to those
intended.

Received on Saturday, 4 October 2003 09:28:37 UTC