RE: ALT revisited

Thanks

Gregg

-- ------------------------------
Gregg C. Vanderheiden Ph.D.
Professor - Dept of Industrial Engineering
Director - Trace R & D Center, Waisman Center
University of Wisconsin- Madison
gv@trace.wisc.edu,    WWW&FTP at  Trace.Wisc.Edu
for a list of our Listserves send "index" to listproc@trace.wisc.edu


-----Original Message-----
From:	Daniel Dardailler [SMTP:danield@w3.org]
Sent:	Friday, June 27, 1997 10:44 AM
To:	po@trace.wisc.edu
Cc:	WAI Working Group
Subject:	Re: ALT revisited


> 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 ?

Issue is not new.  But usually at least part of the alt text would show. 
 In IE it word wraps to fit in the image box.




> 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 ?)

Netscape Nav Gold and the new Communicator both had authoring (WISIWYG) 
tools built in.   in Gold the alt text entry field was at the top level of 
the dialog right along side the "path to the image file" field.    In the 
new communicator you need to call up a separate sub-dialog box in order to 
enter the alt text.




>  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.

Not generally usable.   I would not do that in an authoring tool.   In a 
browser it might not be a bad idea if you showed the filename and one root 
level higher in the path (which is often where the name of the picture is 
as in     gore/large.gif  ) if the web page does not have any alt text. 
 But I would NOT have an author tool do this.



> 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 ?

?????  interesting.

I'll post it on site at

 http://trace.wisc.edu/~ie662/alttext.htm




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

Precisely my point.  [this was an example of what the guideline would have 
to look like -- showing that it is non-sensical]  What I was trying to say 
is that unless we get some fixes into the browsers - the advice we must 
give to web designers is so convoluted as to be unusable.   If you look at 
the example carefully you will see that it requires the page designer to 
know in advance what the font setting of the users browser is.    This is 
clearly impossible.

Received on Friday, 27 June 1997 12:32:22 UTC