Re: ALT revisited

> FIRST - All of the behavior reported is for the Win95 version of the 
> program.  I have not checked any other versions.

I'll take a look at the Unix version but I don't expect miracle here.
 
> 2)  If you DO set the Height and Width and the Width you set is not big 
> enough to hold the ENTIRE alt text,  then NONE of the alt text is 
> displayed.

I remembered discussing ALT relationg to WIDTH/HEIGHT a while ago, so
it must not be new, is it ?
 
> MOVING OF THE ALT TEXT TO A LOWER LEVEL IN THE IMAGE PROPERTIES

You're talking about some authoring image tool here ?
(or is it a new dialog in 4.0 ?)
 
>  It would be EVEN BETTER if it prompted for the alt text... though it 
> should not require it I don't think (there may be places where it is not 
> appropriate and situations where someone else will do the alt text).  There 
> are already prompts for other things like image files that aren't found at 
> the specified location and they are easy to dismiss.

On a related topic, the Amaya team (W3C own HTML authoring tool) has
recently asked me if defaulting the IMG ALT to the image name
(filename or image name if available in the format) was a good idea.

> For convenience I have attached a page I tossed together quickly to explore 
> the problem briefly.  I have pasted this memo into the bottom to make it 
> easier to read and look at.    Different conditions are shown for 
> information

Somehow your page is full of encoded character replaced by "3D".
Could you point at it directly on the web at Trace ?
 
> 2)  WHEN YOU TURN OFF IMAGES THEY SHOULD NOT APPEAR EVEN IF THEY ARE IN THE 
> CACHE.
> The Alt text should appear instead.  This makes it much easier for 
> webmasters and others to check their web pages to see if and how well the 
> ALT TEXT appears.

Yes, Al's message is about that.
 
>  For example the guideline looks like it would read
> 
> " Use ALT TEXT with all graphics and do NOT use either the height or width 
> command unless you are certain that the the width of the text (in whatever 
> font size the user has as his default) in the ALT TEXT message is less than 
> the width you have set  for you image and the text height is less than the 
> height set for the image."
> 
> "Do not make ALT TEXT (in the user set font size) longer than the width 
> from the left edge of the graphic  to the right edge of the page (on a 640 
> x480 screen)   (or the right edge of the graphic if it has a WIDTH command)

Gosh, I really wish we can avoid that level of hackery.

Linking the size of the graphics to the size of the alt text is such a
bad design principle... Thousand of generations of web-surfer will
hate us for that decision :-)

The core question is to know how important Netscape rendering
compliance is to users of ALT text, and we need to weight in users of
ALT text using pwWebspeak of Lynx or whatever that smarter than
Navigator, that shouldn't pay the price of short-to-useless ALT text
that fit into a graphics.

From this study steams the recommendation for authors to constrain -
or not - their design of ALT text to Netscape peculiarities.

Received on Friday, 27 June 1997 11:44:09 UTC