- From: Tim Jackson <lists@timj.co.uk>
- Date: Tue, 3 Aug 2004 09:35:39 +0100
- To: "Jason Delaplain" <delaplain@hotmail.com>
- Cc: <www-validator@w3.org>
Hi Jason, on Tue, 3 Aug 2004 00:02:53 -0700 you wrote: > There are a few invalid markups that I don't understand. For instance, > I had one that said ALIGN="ABSMIDDLE" should be "MIDDLE" instead. When > I adjusted it, it didn't show the image in the Absolute Middle. Well, make sure you understand the distinction between what a standard (well, a DTD anyway) says is valid, and what a user agent (a browser) does with it. Just because some browser interprets "align='absmiddle'" doesn't make it a standard, and just because a standard says that you should use "align='middle'" doesn't necessarily mean that browsers support it, or do something useful with it. What you're talking about in terms of "absmiddle" is, IIRC, an ugly proprietary hack introduced quite a long time ago. In this case, you might want to consider using CSS. Generally speaking, the "vertical-align" property usually works reasonably well with modern browers, although whether it gives you the pixel-perfection you're after I'm not sure. Eric Meyer's book "Cascading Style Sheets 2.0 Programmers Reference" has a very handy and succinct explanation of text alignment and how it works. > The other is a required ALT tag. I don't see why an ALT tag is > considered required. Try looking at your site with images turned off (Opera is useful for this as you can easily toggle on/off), or in a text-only browser (e.g. lynx or links). Then you'll see. The ALT attribute is crucial to let a user agent know what to display if it can't show images, including nothing. (If you have images which are purely decorative and have no actual meaningful content, set alt="" and then the browser will know that it can skip over them.) Tim
Received on Tuesday, 3 August 2004 04:35:41 UTC