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Re: Null or empty ALT attribute?

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Jun 13, 2005 6:53AM

On Fri, 10 Jun 2005, Jared Smith wrote:

> Any system that does not allow null alt text (previous versions of
> Frontpage and Dreamweaver come to mind) is flawed.

Certainly. And so is a system that makes it unnecessarily difficult to use
a null alt text, such as newer versions of FrontPage (where you need to
check a box with text saying "this image does not need alternate text"
or something like that, something rather absurd (since checking it does
not cause the alt attribute to be omitted but the generation of
alt="").

Regarding blank alt text, alt=" ", it is surely adequate when an image is
used as a spacer between words that have no real whitespace between them.
Spacer images are bad practice, but they have been used, and are still
used; _if_ you use them, alt=" " helps against some problems.

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/