Image alt tags and browsers

[sally]

I have a mystery

Yesterday I changed the image alt tags on my site, for example the goldfish image on the index page now has a keyword phrase instead of "goldfish".

However, when I hover over the image in IE the alt tag shows but in FF it says Register now! Also in FF none of the other alt tags work.

Is that a setting in FF or something wrong with my site?

[Littledot]

I am seeing it as Internet dating uk, is that right?

[dave_n]

ff is picking up the a href title rather than the alt tag

<a href="join.php" title="Register now"><img id="goldfish" src="skins_site/def/images/take-the-plunge.jpg" alt="Internet dating UK" /></a>

The ALT tag for images is NOT supposed to produce a little tooltip when you mouseover an image, according to the HTML spec. This is supposed to be the job of the TITLE tag.

Firefox has never done this for ALT tags, correctly obeying the spec. This always confused me, because some images would pop a tooltip and others wouldn’t. Apparently the ones that did also had a TITLE tag, unbeknowst to me.

However, IE has always done it for the ALT tag too, which actually seems reasonable to me. I don’t see the harm.

So someone created an extention for Firefox to “fix” this problem. Not everyone was pleased

[sally]

Yes Littledot that is exactly what it should be.

So I don't need to do anything, it's just an FF issue?

Am rather impressed and scared that you could so easily find exactly where FF is picking up my info.

[dave_n]

Yes Littledot that is exactly what it should be.

So I don't need to do anything, it's just an FF issue?

Am rather impressed and scared that you could so easily find exactly where FF is picking up my info.

lol....i have that effect!
right click on the page and 'view source' gives me the source of your static code.

[sally]

So aren't search engines going to be able to work out that it is a picture of a goldfish but called UK internet dating?

Will they notice there is something fishy going on You have to love puns

[dave_n]

So aren't search engines going to be able to work out that it is a picture of a goldfish but called UK internet dating?

Will they notice there is something fishy going on You have to love puns

unfortunately search engines are not good at extracting meta data out of images....well google isn't anyway.
Unfortunately google is the main search engine...which is a shame as it is years behind with actual search technologies...but that's for another thread I guess!

[sally]

Oh dear, that has ruined my plan to conquer the universe. I was only going by searching my keywords and all the top ranking sites have the keywords in image alt tags.

Ho hum back to the drawing board again

[RayB]

When you hover in firefox it does not show the alt text, but will show the image title (if there is one) - and these are 2 different things

IE will display the alt text on hover, as opposed to title.

Firefox is behaving correctly, whereas IE does not as far as W3C is concerned.

Best way is to check your source code

[sally]

Check my source code for what Ray?