Firefox not showing ALT verbiage for img src

keperry · Post by **keperry** » February 16th, 2006, 1:45 pm

Sorry, but I just find this a little ridiculous. So should we praise Firefox/Mozilla for following a standard that no one cares about....especially the end users. I think Mozilla should take the time and money to re-educate the developers that are creating the sites and web apps that produce alt text (for its purpose in a tool tip). Is it the users fault that the web designer/administrator/contributor doesn't know this little bit of differentiation between when to use ALT and TITLE.

I purchased several books on website development...albiet a couple of years ago, but nothing ever mentioned anything about using the TITLE tag with images. Bottom line is that it's the developers making the mistakes that hurt the end user. Isn't firefox mainly for end users?

I love the people that rave about firefox because its not as commonly used (unique), and they rip on MS IE. These same people, in my opinion, that would rip on Firefox if it ever got as big as IE. It's like they can't respect the good in both (sorry but IE has one up on Firefox here).

old np · Post by **old np** » February 16th, 2006, 1:59 pm

I know! Not being able to use alt for tooltips is so annoying! As a web developer, writing "title" is hard. the l looks like the t, and when accidentally put a capital I, I really can't tell if I wrote it right. I can't believe that the Mozilla developers followed the spec that was written 10 years ago and didn't spend a cent on an advertising campaign to tell me I'm wrong. And this whole "accessibility" thing is a joke. How many blind people or dial-up users exist nowadays? Next to none! Screw those people, I'm just going to lock Firefox users out of my site, because without the use of alt tooltips, my site is unusable

.

keperry · Post by **keperry** » February 16th, 2006, 2:04 pm

You stay in your "little" world, and Firefox will surely stay in its own little world, too

BTW--way to address any of the points I brought up.

old np · Post by **old np** » February 16th, 2006, 2:23 pm

Thanks.

jqp · Post by **jqp** » February 16th, 2006, 3:01 pm

I wrote a short GM script for this a while back. I've found my GM script to be helpful from time to time. I've also found it to be annoynig from time to time: text really meant to be alternate text appearing as a tooltip is sometimes annoying. See the link in my sig.

Cyberman · Post by **Cyberman** » February 17th, 2006, 6:43 am

There is no way in this to not hurt the end user and educate the developers.

Matter of fact, showing the ALT text will hurt the end user almost as much as not showing it.

In any case, there are websites that´re going to be broken. Do you want to break compliant pages, written by people who think before the write, or rather those that are sloppy made, without regard to specs or standards?

jqp · Post by **jqp** » February 17th, 2006, 6:50 am

mind if I illustrate that a little?

I was at the Fedex site yesterday shipping a package, and when I got done entering my information, I clicked the Continue button. The Continue button is an image with alt text. Using my GM script, I saw a tooltip that popped up that said "Continue" before I could click the button.

I was already well aware that the button said "Continue" and didn't need a tooltip to help me. The tooltip was more annoying than helpful. Useless tooltips popping up like that are more distracting than helpful.

So, yeah, what Cyberman said isn't "if we lived in a perfect world" philosophy. It's reality that occurs often enough to matter.

stickmaker · Post by **stickmaker** » December 23rd, 2006, 8:59 am

Useful and informative discussion. I want "nicer" tooltips but am disappointed that Firefox shows only part of my TITLE tags in ONE line, while IE7 shows all of it, multi-line. Is that a bug in FF? I hope not; I love FF. Here is my effort to understand it all:

<http>
<head>
<title> test Tool Tip or Tooltip codes </title>



</head>

<body>

test of tooltips

<a href="http://www.sticksite.com/"> <alt> Link to my website</a>

<p><br>
<img alt="this is an ALT tag" title="this is a TITLE tag" src="dog.jpg">

</body>
</html>

stickmaker · Post by **stickmaker** » December 23rd, 2006, 9:03 am

Hmmmm; what I pasted into that comment does not show; everything between "test of tooltips" and "this is an ALT tag" is gone and partly replaced with that link.

Post by **BenBasson** » December 23rd, 2006, 11:13 am

stickmaker wrote:Useful and informative discussion. I want "nicer" tooltips but am disappointed that Firefox shows only part of my TITLE tags in ONE line, while IE7 shows all of it, multi-line. Is that a bug in FF? I hope not; I love FF.

Yes, it's unfortunately a long-standing bug in Firefox.

stickmaker wrote:Hmmmm; what I pasted into that comment does not show; everything between "test of tooltips" and "this is an ALT tag" is gone and partly replaced with that link.

You need to disable HTML when you put code in your posts here, otherwise the forum tries to absorb it.

BenoitRen · Post by **BenoitRen** » December 23rd, 2006, 1:32 pm

I want "nicer" tooltips but am disappointed that Firefox shows only part of my TITLE tags in ONE line, while IE7 shows all of it, multi-line.

SeaMonkey 1.1, coming out within one month or so, will fix part or all of this. Didn't read up on the details.

Post by **BenBasson** » December 23rd, 2006, 4:34 pm

Is that a trunk core fix or a SeaMonkey only fix?

Philip Chee · Post by **Philip Chee** » December 24th, 2006, 7:18 am

Cusser wrote:
stickmaker wrote:Useful and informative discussion. I want "nicer" tooltips but am disappointed that Firefox shows only part of my TITLE tags in ONE line, while IE7 shows all of it, multi-line. Is that a bug in FF? I hope not; I love FF.
Yes, it's unfortunately a long-standing bug in Firefox.

Multiline tooltips are fixed on trunk, well at least on SeaMonkey.

Phil

Philip Chee · Post by **Philip Chee** » December 24th, 2006, 7:22 am

Cusser wrote:Is that a trunk core fix or a SeaMonkey only fix?

There is a bug open to port the fix to Firefox. So if it isn't already done it should be there soon.

To clarify, now that the reflow branch has landed, the several blocking bugs that prevent multi-line tooltips from working have been fixed, so it's just a matter of turning them back on - they were turned off long ago because of the said bugs.

Phil

Post by **BenBasson** » December 24th, 2006, 9:14 am

Ah, excellent - thanks for the clarification.

Firefox not showing ALT verbiage for img src

All great points, but it hurts the user