RE: tlug: HTML again

[Matt Gushee <matt@example.com>]

Scott Stone writes:

 > >  > a waste of bandwidth. The HTML standard doesn't specify it as required.
 > > 
 > > HTML 4.0 does. Better get used to it.
 > 
 > why?  Nothing enforces it.

Okay, maybe "better" is putting it too strongly. Would you feel better 
if I said "should"?

Darren Cook writes:

 > Maybe this is coming back to the purpose of your site. If you put
 > alt="icon" then when the user moves their mouse over it the word icon pops
 > up. I mostly work on sites where guys with pony tails argue over the
 > aesthetics of whether an image should be 190 or 195 pixels wide, and having
 > "icon" pop up just ruins the whole atmosphere. :-).

I see your point. I'm not sure the popup thing for ALTs is good design 
on the part of the browser makers. Personally, I dislike anything that 
pops up unless I asked it to.

 > 
 > On documentation and information sites you don't have gratuitous images
 > like this, so every image deserves an ALT.

That, too.

 > >HTML 4.0 does. Better get used to it.
 > 
 > O'Reilly's Definitive Guide To HTML describes it as optional but
 > recommended for most images.

I think that's out of date. My source is the HTML 4.0 DTD, which I
obtained directly from the W3C.

I don't really want to argue about ALT tags. Granted, there are times
when they're unnecessary. But it is in the standard. And one of the
main reasons HTML is as hard to write as it is, is that the browser
makers chose to disregard the standards and defined their own dialects
of HTML. Now we have HTML 4.0, which is well-thought out, supported
(at least nominally) by both Netscape and Microsoft, and by the way,
very readable. It's surely imperfect, as all standards are. But it is
perhaps the only hope we have of restoring some kind of sanity to web
production.

Of course, it's primarily up to the browser makers to comply with the
standard. But I also think that authors and website maintainers have a 
civic duty ;-) to understand the standard, to use it, and to keep the
big guys honest.

Matt Gushee
Oshamanbe, Hokkaido
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