test please delete

[NickFitz]

I think this cartoon is very sad. Or rather, the alt text is.

content of the title attribute

This was one of the hardest-fought battles with Microsoft over the epic fail of Internet Explorer, finally won with IE 8 (in IE 8 mode).

HTML 4.01 makes it perfectly clear that the alt attribute of an img element is intended to provide alternative text that can be used as a substitute when the image is not available, whether through network failure, or through a limitation of the client software (e.g. a text-only browser like Lynx) or, indeed, a limitation of the user (e.g. an unsighted person). The title attribute, which applies to many elements rather than just the img element, is intended to provide additional information relating to that element.

Now, what is a tooltip? Is it a substitute for the thing to which it relates? Or is it additional information concerning the thing to which it relates? Clearly the latter. And this is why Internet Explorer is the only browser to display the contents of the alt attribute as a tooltip.

Although this was clearly a Bad Thing - particularly given that IE does not properly display the contents of the alt attribute as a textual substitute if, for some reason, the image is unavailable - Microsoft (and specifically certain members of the IE Team) continued to whinge for years that, now that they'd fscked things up so badly, people had come to rely on it, so they couldn't start doing it properly.

They also added insult to injury by insisting that there was nothing wrong in what they did, even though it was clearly incorrect and directly damaged efforts to encourage people to make their web sites accessible to those with disabilities.

As a result, those of us (like me) who care about interoperability have spent years adding empty title attributes to images when appropriate, as they overrode the tooltip mechanism, meaning that the alt attribute could be used for its intended purpose without driving everybody crazy when they accidentally let the mouse come to rest on an inline image, and a tooltip containing text intended for the case when the image which they could see wasn't there suddenly obscured half of the sentence they were trying to read.

xkcd.com uses the title attribute in the way it was intended

Although the content of the alt attribute is merely the title of the particular strip, so there's fail there

[NickFitz]

...a tooltip containing text intended for the case when the image which they could see wasn't there suddenly obscured half of the sentence they were trying to read.

Incidentally, vBulletin (the forum application that powers CUK) displays the converse problem with smilies: it includes the name of the smiley in the title attribute when the smiley is inlined in text like this meaning that, if your mouse hovers over it, a tooltip appears and obscures the text. Clearly the vBulletin developers don't understand the orthogonal purposes of the alt and title attributes either. The alt attribute should contain the name of the smiley for the cases where it is needed, but the title attribute should be empty (or, in a world without IE, omitted) as you don't need a tooltip saying "Wave" when your mouse pointer happens to come to rest over a picture of somebody waving.

[RichardCranium]

I think this cartoon is very sad. Or rather, the alt text is.

content of the title attribute

<snip explanation>

<snip another explanation the other way around>

So can a mere luser like me be a little bit forgiven for not having a clue? I thought it was called "hover text" but was not sure so I spent five minutes online looking to see what other people called it on the xkcd side and picked the most convincing.

[RichardCranium]

Actually, NF, you've sort of explained something for me.

Once upon a time I was a tuliphot programmer. I was doing complex business systems, technically very sophisticated in 3GLs. I knew everything that would happen as a consequence of writing a line of code. For the languages I knew, I knew everything you could do with the language. I cannot claim I knew every programming technique there is, oh no, of course not. But I knew my languages and systems inside out.

Then Windows came along.

I could not understand how these libraries were supposed to be used. There were hundreds of thousands of permutations of potential commands, many of which were alternative ways of doing the same thing. I never grasped the underlying beauty, the design paradigm, the philosophy of how it had been put together. Because of that, my brain never managed to take it on board.

I decided my inability to grasp the fundamental concepts of Windows programming meant I never did ge my head around it properly.

It never dawned on me that it was the design of Windows that was at fault.

Then I was presented with Microsoft Visual C v6. An entire shelf load of manuals. It was a complete shambles.

So I revert to K&R's books on C. C is an abortion of a language. It has no beauty, no elegance. It is assembler with big tits and a collagen arse. How on earth did the world get to take on a language with no memory management and an ambiguous syntax?

But I looked at this Visual C and concluded that was too hard because I couldn't see the underlying simplicity in that either.

It never dawned on me there might be none.

Then there's web development.

I threw some sites and pages together. I even came up with a spiffy idea of providing different HTML according to where the request came from; I wrote a noughts and crosses server. All written in HTML using a text editor but with a back end database for providing some logic / prepared HTML, etc. Then someone pointed out other people had being doing the same, there was even a chess server! Kewl! So I got bored and went back to n-tier multi-platform database replication programming.

When I next looked at web development, I couldn;t believe how mental it had become. A dozen ways of doing the same thing. Basic elements like TABLES no longer worked. Huh? How did that happen? And all over the web there's advice saying you have to code the same piece of page structure multiple times for different browsers. WTF??? "code a piece of page structure"? "multiple times"? "for different browsers?"

WTF are the standards?

Whatever happened to standards?


When I worked in DP, programming was an art. It produced works of beauty that could have elegance, style, precision and correctness. You could predict from the style of someone's code whether the program would work.

ICT, however, has become a pile of tulip. Multiple files in multiple places just to provide a web page? Huh? Server side and client side code? Eh? I need to download a 3rd party app just to see your splash screen? Nobody can differentiate form from content? What? Why not?

The whole web thing is a pile of crocks of tulip.

So despite 25 years of computing experience, I REFUSE to apologise for not understanding why the wrong thing is being used for the wrong purpose on some web sites and then getting the terminology wrong. Because:

I DIDN'T BREAK IT.

[voodooflux]

Morning all

[voodooflux]

C is an abortion of a language. It has no beauty, no elegance.

Really? I am of the opposite opinion - I find C an elegant language, beautiful in its simplicity. Hence K&R (second edition) can cover everything you ever need to know about it in just 272 pages.

[voodooflux]

DS2 is playing a skateboarding game on the Wii, using the balance board. It looks like hard work - there's a danger it might qualify as exercise if I tried it.

[voodooflux]

sausage rolls

Meaty on the inside, light and fluffy on the outside?

[voodooflux]

Oooo, the West Brom game is on Sky Sports this afternoon. We're unbeaten so far this season

OK, so we have only played 3 games.

[voodooflux]

It sounds like there is some sort of fair on at the park today, so we'll take the kids over there after lunch.