[l2h] ALT tags in equations

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Fri, 9 Apr 1999, Bruce R Miller wrote:

> While it certainly can be useful to specify or alter the ALT text that is
> attached to images generated by l2h, the ALT attribute of HTML was _never_
> intended to be a `tool tip'!

Quite so.  The TITLE attribute is intended to be used to supply
additional information about the construct to which it is applied. The
ALT attribute is meant to be for ALTernative text, to be used when the
image is _not_ being displayed.

And indeed MSIE, for all its other faults, has this substantially
right: it uses the TITLE attribute as its "tool tip".  The debatable
part is that in the absence of a TITLE attribute, it still uses the
ALT attribute to make a tool-tip: but an author can suppress this
behaviour by explicitly specifying a null TITLE attribute, TITLE="",
at least in recent versions that I have tried.

It may be hoped that NS will catch up with this behaviour.

> It seemed Cool the first time I saw them popping up.  But then I thought about
> how to write ALT text that served BOTH the original purpose of ALTernative text
> to be used in place of an image, AND worked as a tool-tip... Ugh!

I can only agree with your verdict there ;-)


p.s (re the Subject line): there is no ALT "tag", it's an attribute
of the IMG tag (and of the AREA tag, but that's offtopic here).