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RE: Complication of the alt text issue

for

From: Kristin Evenson Hirst
Date: Mar 13, 2002 7:17AM

At 06:40 PM 3/12/02 -0500, Kim Grinfeder < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

>And while I am writing to the list and we are talking about alt tags, I
>had to remove all alt tags from images because our designer (I am a
>developer) did not want them showing up when the mouse was over the
>images, I replaced the alt tags with longdesc tags. Is this helpful at
>all or bad form?

Your designer should go back to and stick to print, where one can totally
control the final image. Web pages are developed, not designed, and the
best one can do about appearance is to suggest it. If your designer gets
all huffy, try running a few of his pages through an HTML validator --
http://validator.w3.org/ -- and ask questions like

Why are there four references to an external stylesheet (with the first two
being invalid)?
<LINK href="ubd.css" type=text/css rel=stylesheet>
<LINK href="Untitled Document_files/ubd.css" type=text/css rel=stylesheet>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="ubd.css" type="text/css">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="ubd.css" type="text/css">

Why specify font color repeatedly when there's a stylesheet that could be used?

See http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/alt/alt-text.html for a useful
discussion of ALT text.

See also
Web Pages aren't Printed on Paper
Or how I gave up trying to "control" web pages and discovered adaptability
http://www.westciv.com/style_master/house/good_oil/not_paper/index.html


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