[vox-tech] XSLT questions

[Jeff Newmiller]

Please retain attribution when quoting.

On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, karthikeyan wrote:

[helpful link removed]

Jonathan McPherson said:

> > alt attribute for those images?  (Of course, XHTML won't let me not have
> > an alt attribute...)

to which karthikeyan responded:

> And why not?  my xhtml pages also does have alt tag and it gets validated
> fine.  I use transitional and not strict dtd.

... unless karthikeyan is missing a "not", he apparently did not read the
comment correctly.  Jonathan said he doesn't want to put an alt attribute
in, but it won't validate with the attribute missing.  Further,
karthikeyan's question is answered by his own comment that he uses
transitional validation... which will be deprecated eventually.

I am no great shakes as an html author, but I do have some opinions
regarding Jonathan's original question:

> > Here's a question for you, somewhat unrelated: what do you think the alt
> > attribute should contain for images that have no real semantic meaning?
> > Let's say, for example, that I have four "rounded corner" images so that
> > I can make rounded corners in my site's design.  What should I put in the
> > alt attribute for those images?

Alt is present for textual representation of the graphic ... it should
serve in place of the graphic if the graphic cannot be displayed.  Think
of the "links" browser... or better yet, a blind person listening to an
html-to-voice translator.  A graphical "box" might be shown as

    [+][-------------][+]
    [|] some content ][|]
    [|][-------------][+]

or as

    [ul-corner][hline][ur-corner]
    [vline] some content [vline]
    [ll-corner][hline][lr-corner]

but

    [][][]
    [] some content []
    [][][]

may do just as well (ALT="").  Which you use depends on how you want your
audience to perceive the box.  My preference is the middle one.

http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/alt/alt-text.html has some interesting
things to say on this topic, and leans toward the last option.  Which is
right probably depends on why you wanted to border the "some content" in
the first place... I don't like using graphics gratuitously (but then my
perspective may be a bit off-normal...).

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