Anne van Kesteren: Weblog 4.2

Weblog on W3C, WHATWG, HTML, CSS, DOM, XML, HTTP and more.

Alternative content and tooltips

Tooltips. The kind of thing people associate with the HTML title attribute. And, apparently, the alt attribute due to some nice implementations of that. (Netscape Navigator 4 and Internet Explorer 4 started this tradition as far as I know.) Now the alt attribute is for alternative content, not tooltips. Another way to look at this is taking the object element. Semantically, the following two are more or less equivalent:

<object data="image">TEST</object>
<img src="image" alt="TEST">

Do you expect both to show a “tooltip?” One? Or a more sane thing: none of the above? If image could not be loaded, would you still expect a “tooltip” when hovering the content? Here are the answers: “no,” “no,” “yes” and “no.”

6th February 2006

Browse through posts: alt as a tooltip ← main → The validator tells me I’m Web 3.0.