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RE: <h> around images

for

From: Jukka Korpela
Date: Sep 2, 2002 12:20AM

Steve Vosloo wrote:

> A client of mine has a site where every page
> title is a GIF ...

I presume you mean main heading. The title, in the sense 'the content of the
<title> element', is always plain text by HTML syntax

> I told them to rather change it to HTML
> text using an <h1> header. Could I have told them to simply
> put <h1> tags around the image?

You could, but it depends on the circumstances, especially the nature of the
image, whether that would be the optimal solution.

In particular, if the image is a company logo, containing the company's name
in a particular presentation style in which it has become a well-known
symbol, then it would often be better to use the image. For most people, the
image would be more informative, more easily recognizable, more accessible.
In most situations where imageless browsing is used out of necessity (rather
than convenience), it does not disturb the user that an <img> element is
used instead of text, provided that the <img> element has an adequate alt
text of course.

On the other hand, if the image is just a particularly styled version of the
company's name, perhaps different from the style used last (or next) week,
it might be better to use just text, optionally with presentational features
like colors and font face suggested in CSS (or even in HTML).

Typically, a logo image cannot be satisfactorily approximated by using CSS
(or HTML) styling features on text. It could even be somewhat alienating to
arrive at a page of a widely known company with a widely known logo and
_not_ see the logo there, in a browsing situation where images are generally
viewed.

But as regards to using an image as the main heading on _all_ pages (not
just the main page of a site), I think that's rather questionable. A main
heading should reflect the content of the current page, not the site. If a
page is about new products of FooBar, then it's main heading should be
something like "New products of FooBar", not "FooBar". Maybe you meant that
the logo image is _part_ of each main heading? That could usually be
arranged, and might be a good idea. It could be something like
<h1><img alt="FooBar:" src="logo.png"> New products</h1>
(Some styling would normally be needed to make it look nice.)

> Because of the resizing of text factor I think HTML text is a better
> long term solution ... But on a tight budget it'd be better
> for them to
> use <h1>'s around an image than ignore the problem completely.

Quite right. But there are other factors too, not necessarily related to
budgets or resizability. Even if (or when) scaleable image formats will be
used on pages and adequately processed by browsers, text will be in many
ways better than image to present textual information; for example, text
presentation is automatically affected by the user's choice of font face and
colors too. But on the other hand, the style and visual appearance of text
and associated decoration can be part of the information. For example, it is
possible that a name by itself is not trademarked but a particular visual
apperance of a name is trademarked. (If you use such an image on a Web page,
you should consider whether the alt text needs to be a little more than the
name only.)

--
Jukka Korpela, senior adviser
TIEKE Finnish Information Society Development Centre
http://www.tieke.fi
Phone: +358 9 4763 0397 Fax: +358 9 4763 0399


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