WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: coding attributes for image links

for

From: Christophe Strobbe
Date: May 6, 2009 9:45AM

At 16:33 6/05/2009, Jared Smith wrote:
>On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 2:32 AM, Christophe Strobbe wrote:
>
> > There is actually no evidence in the HTML 4.01 specification that
> > displaying the alt attribute as a tooltip is a violation or a
> > "misapplication".
>
>True, the spec you provide does not say, "Don't show alt text in a
>tooltip." But it does say, "... alternate text to serve as content
>when the element cannot be rendered normally" and "For user agents
>that cannot display images... this attribute specifies alternate
>text." By my (and I think most people's) interpretation of this,
>*alternative* text should only be rendered when the image cannot be
>rendered.

The point is that saying: "For user agents that cannot display
images... this attribute specifies alternate text" does not mean that
providing a tooltip is prohibited. Internet Explorer already showed
tooltips like this when HTML 4.0 was drafted but the editors did not
make any statement on this kind of behaviour, even though the spec
contains many other "should not" statements.


> > I've never seen any arguments that go beyond "the other browsers
> don't do it".
>
>And considering the general compliance to standards in IE versus "the
>other browsers", this should probably be evidence enough that IE is
>probably doing it wrong.

1. Does this mean that the real reason behind this interpretation of
the HTML 4 spec is IE bashing?
2. There are no official reference implementations of HTML (in fact,
I have never seen a browser that implements all of HTML), so the
behaviour of other browsers is not always a reliable indicator.


>Ultimately, it doesn't really matter that much though.

Does this mean that stating that IE's behaviour is not according to
specification is unnecessary quibbling?


Best regards,

Christophe



--
Christophe Strobbe
K.U.Leuven - Dept. of Electrical Engineering - SCD
Research Group on Document Architectures
Kasteelpark Arenberg 10 bus 2442
B-3001 Leuven-Heverlee
BELGIUM
tel: +32 16 32 85 51
http://www.docarch.be/
---
"Better products and services through end-user empowerment"
http://www.usem-net.eu/
---
Please don't invite me to LinkedIn, Facebook, Quechup or other
"social networks". You may have agreed to their "privacy policy", but
I haven't.