So in case you missed it in the comment thread below …
MSIE 5 introduced a non-standard “feature” into its interpretation of HTML (“No! Say it ain’t so, Bill!”). It started having ALT text in IMG statements show up as Tool Tips (little floating yellow boxes explaining that pop up if you hover over the image).
While this seems like a reasonably cool thing to do, it’s not part of the W3C standards, and there are plenty of folks who are vehemently irked about it. They note that you should be using the TITLE attribute in IMG statements for such things; the ALT attribute is for alternative text to substitute for an image should the person be browsing with images turned off, or because they use a text browser (read aloud by the computer) because of visual problems. (You can see the text showing up the image placeholder while the image is loading.)
(One site I ran across said that 30% of users leave images turned off in their browser. That seems wildly overblown to me; I’ve never seen anyone do that. But I digress.)
I’ve been going along, blithely, in IE-de-facto Land, assuming that all the ALT text I have in most of my images has shown up if you hover the mouse over it. Since about 85-90% of my readers use MSIE, that’s not been a wildly inappropriate conclusion. Enough are now using Netscape/Mozilla/Firebird platform browsers, which now don’t do the ALT tool tip trick, to make it worth looking at.
The problem I found, in testing, was that MSIE didn’t (despite what everyone says) seem to render TITLE text as pop-ups either.
And … well, that’s interesting. The results are different from what I was seeing last night. How bizarre.
Of the three pictures above, the one on the left has just ALT text, the one in the middle has just TITLE text, and the one on the right has both.
MSIE should give you a tool tip for all three; on the right-hand one, it should note you’re seeing the TITLE text.
Mozilla (if you aren’t using the ALT text add-in) should show tool tips only on the left and middle ones.
The irksome thing here is that if you want to have tool tips show up, you need to use the TITLE text. If you want to be accessible to the visually handicapped, you should use ALT text. And in 95% of the cases, you’re going to end up repeating the same thing in both of them. Which seems like a pain in the patootie, to me.
On the other hand …
Well, anyhow. I think I’ll try to figure out why my experiment last night didn’t give me any TITLE text showing up.
UPDATE: Okay, it’s the damned MT strip-HTML-stuff-unless-you-say-it’s-okay feature. I need to add TITLE into the IMG statement as an allowed attribute. Rassafrassa …
UPDATE 2: Okay, so one of the things I have to do is start considering where I need to use TITLE text along with ALT text. See what all you “standards-compliant” heart-palpatation types make me go through?
I’ve modified all my templates to use TITLE as well as ALT (and to reduce the size of the ALT text to something more reasonable). I’ve not done a full rebuild, but the changes should start rippling through anything that gets updated here on out.