Can I disable copy-and-pasting of ALT tag text on pages?

[karldied]

Firefox 1.5.0.7 on Mac OS X 10.3.9

When I copy and past a page, such as URL: http://offer.ebay.com/ebaymotors/ws/eBa ... 0048757821

the hidden ALT text associated with the star images is included. Is there some preference somewhere that can be set to exclude it?

Thanks, Karl

[dickvl]

Try the Copy plain text extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/134/

[karldied]

Thanks for the suggestion to try Copy Plain Text extesion. I installed and tried it out.

It does what it says: web page stuff is plain text when pasted into Word, no need to go through Notepad.

It DOES NOT: skip copying the ALT TAG text of images.

Any more knowledge on this?

Thanks, Karl

[dickvl]

The Alt text is used if the image can not be displayed and you want to copy text.
So apparently that is working as it should.

[telescapes]

Firefox/Camino copy the "alt text" from graphics when they are embedded in Web-page text. Sometimes this is useful if the alt text is different than the caption, but usually the alt text is the same as the picture caption and you end up with an exact duplicate of the caption text.

Even more annoying, Firefox/Camino copies the alt text from embedded advertisements!

It would be nice to be able to turn this "feature" on and off--or just off, since other browsers don't do this.

[telescapes]

I forgot to mention that I'm using Mac OS X 10.4.8 and the latest Firefox 2 but I've noticed this same "feature" running Firefox 1.5 in OS 9 and also Netscape 7.2 in OS X 10.4.8 so this must go way back to its roots.

Also, the "other browsers" I use that don't have this behavior are Opera, iCab, Safari and IE.

[Guest]

As an example of FF copying "alt text" that's particularly disturbing, try copying the body text from http://www.freenewmexican.com/news/51534.html.

Embedded in the text is the following html code, which I then have to take the time to manually delete:

<table><tr><td><img src='http://photos.freenewmexican.com/2006/11/02/41995_375x375.jpg' border='0' width='375' height='281' usemap='#imgmap41995_375x281'><map><area></map></td><td><img src='/images/shadow/tr.gif' width='10' height='10' border='0'></td></tr><tr><td><div><div>In this undated handout image released by Firefox, a screen shot of the browser Firefox is shown. </div></div></td><td><img src='/images/shadow/br.gif' width='10' height='10' border='0'></td></tr></table>

<table><tr><td><img src='http://photos.freenewmexican.com/2006/11/02/41996_375x375.jpg' border='0' width='375' height='281' usemap='#imgmap41996_375x281'><map><area></map></td><td><img src='/images/shadow/tr.gif' width='10' height='10' border='0'></td></tr><tr><td><div><div>In this undated handout image released by Opera, a screen shot of the browser Opera is shown. </div></div></td><td><img src='/images/shadow/br.gif' width='10' height='10' border='0'></td></tr></table>

[guest999]

has this copy paste bug been fixed yet ?

this alt text copy is, well stupid and annoying.