Another Installment of Image Filename As Alt Text

Courtesy of this e-mail from Bizjournals.com:

That's an enlightening alt text, Brody. I notice you've stopped stuttering.
Click for full size

As a reminder, also, Internet Explorer displays the value of the alt attribute on mouseover, but Firefox, Safari, and the other cool kids’ faves use the value of the img tag’s title attribute.  So if you’re going to check it, you have to check either in the source code or in both browser.  I prefer both browsers, of course, since it’s faster to mouse over the image in two browsers than to view the source code and look through it for the values of both attributes for each image.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 19th, 2008 at 4:07 am by The Director and is filed under Miscellany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

No Responses to “Another Installment of Image Filename As Alt Text”

  1. strazzerj Says:
    August 20th, 2008 at 6:28 pm

    “As a reminder, also, Internet Explorer displays the value of the alt attribute on mouseover, but Firefox, Safari, and the other cool kids’ faves use the value of the img tag’s title attribute. ”

    Good point.

    That’s true of Internet Explorer up to 7. But IE8 will use the title tag (unless it’s run in IE7 mode).

    So use both attributes to be sure.

    BTW – The IE Developer’s Toobar is a nice way to view attributes without having to peek at source.

    -joe

  2. The Director Says:
    August 20th, 2008 at 7:20 pm

    Also, some search engines (Google) grab the alt text of a heading image if there’s no meta description, even if the title tag is present.

    This happened to a local freelance writer, to whom I pointed it out. She didn’t see it because she uses Firefox and doesn’t understand it. So it remains unfixed.