Re: alt text

Scripsit Harlan Messinger:

"User agents must render alternate text when they cannot support
images, they cannot support a certain image type or when they are
configured not to display images."

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/objects.html#h-13.2

None of these is the case. That's not to say that the browsers
couldn't handle the case of a missing file in the same way, but the
spec doesn't call for it.

It does. You missed a simple statement in the section you quoted, right before the part you quoted:

"The alt attribute specifies alternate text that is rendered when the
image cannot be displayed".

However: are you setting width and height for your images? If so, are
you sure that the ALT text isn't just being cut off because the
"missing image" icon isn't already filling up the space you made
available?

I still haven't seen a decent problem description, so I refrain from commenting on the unknown problem.

However, at the general level, relating to the above suggestion on solving an unknown problem: It's an age-old problem that some browsers use the image dimensions, if specified explicitly, to determine the box size, so that if the alt text doesn't fit, it's truncated. So for years, it's been a common recommendation not to specify width and height for small images with nonempty alt text.

This used to be typical of IE, and in this sad, sick world of bug-compatible browsers, I wouldn't be surprised if Firefox started imitating such a "feature".

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

.

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