[whatwg] alt and title attribute exception

[Steve Faulkner]

Hi Ben

I was not talking about being displayed as a tooltip . 

I was referring to the display as a replacement for an image when images are disabled. There is no indication that the text is advisory information rather than a text alternative. So in this case alt is being displayed in the same way as title.

Regards
SteveF

Sent from my iPhone

On 31 Jul 2012, at 15:36, Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis <bhawkeslewis at googlemail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 1:03 PM, Steve Faulkner
> <faulkner.steve at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> The alt attribute does not represent advisory information. User agents must
>>> not present the contents of the alt attribute in the same way as content
>>> of the title attribute.
> 
> [snip]
> 
>> In situations where alt it not
>> present on an img but title is, in webkit based browsers the title
>> attribute content is displayed on mouse hover and is also displayed in
>> place of the image when images are disabled or not available. This
>> implementation appears to contradict the must requirement in the spec.
> 
> Debatable. It's not showing @alt on hover, so their presentation is different.
> 
> I think showing @alt on hover, as IE used to do, was the behavior this
> text was intending to discourage. That this behavior was wrong was
> after all a major tenet of:
> 
> http://www.hixie.ch/advocacy/alttext
> 
> This was premised on @alt being (potentially long) equivalent text
> rather than being a short name for the image though. Once both @alt
> and @title can be used to provide what could loosely be called titling
> information, the rationale for presenting the two differently begins
> to weaken.
> 
> --
> Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis