[Wolves] mozilla annoyances ?

[Matthew Revell]

Aquarius wrote:

>Because people create crappy alt tags. You want to encourage people to
>use alt tags for alternative text and title tags for tooltips. Anyone
>who has created an alt tag as a tooltip has done a crappy alt tag *by
>definition*. Therefore, if we *don't* display them as tooltips, when
>they say "why doesn't it work as a tooltip?" they'll be told "alt tags
>and title tags are different; add your tooltip to the title tag instead".
>
>  
>
That's very noble - to try to right the wrongs of the world's approach 
to alt tags - but I don't think that making Mozilla appear to be broken, 
in this case, is the right way of going about it. Here's an analogy: our 
beloved government claim to want to move people from the roads and onto 
public transport. So, they increase the cost of motoring. That's the 
brutal, Neanderthal approach. It's also the approach that Mozilla are 
taking with alt tags.

The reality is that people use their cars and expect to use their cars. 
The reality is also that people expect alt tags - for whatever 
historical quirk - to act as tooltips. In the case of the government, 
they should provide a viable alternative to the car (or encourage the 
private sector to do so), rather than just making it more difficult to 
use the car. In the case of Mozilla, probably exclusively in the case of 
alt/title tags, they should educate people, rather than taking the 
brutal approach, which - in the short to medium term - makes the web 
less useful for the majority of Mozilla users.

Just because David Beckham does not have the greatest way with words, I 
don't demand he be prevented from speaking. I might, though, like to 
educate him to improve the way that he uses English, because he's looked 
up to by many young people.

Who's going to tell people that alt and title tags are different? I 
think what'll really happen is people will look at Mozilla and think, 
"Oh, that's broken." It may put some people off from using, it may not 
be of much consequence to others and a -  tiny - minority will pootle 
off and report it as a bug, only to feel the full wrath of one of the 
worst things on the face of the Earth: a fundamentalist in full rant 
mode. Then they'll think, "Ah, sod this, I'm gonna use IE again" and 
Microsoft will continue to do w.t.f they like with web standards and the 
rest of the world will have to go swing.

I keep reading a lot of "Aha, you don't care about disabled people" type 
stuff, surrounding this topic, whenever someone says that alt tags 
should be presented as tooltips. Excuse my language, I'm not often one 
to swear in public forums, but what a load of f*cking bollocks. This 
really angers me: it's no more than social-conscience blackmail. Alt 
tags are displayed by most browsers as tooltips: that does not make 
people write poor alt tags. People write poor alt tags because they 
don't know how to write for the web. People write poor alt tags because 
they don't consider what information they need to communicate with them 
and that has arse all to do with whether or not alt tags are displayed 
as a tool tip. Okay, the standard chant is, "People write tooltips, not 
alt tags" but my response is, yet again, "No, people write bad alt tags, 
whatever the reason and preventing them from being displayed as an 
alternative to tooltip to a missing title tag, does not make people 
write good alt tags". People need to be educated in how to write for the 
web - that's what ContentPeople is for :)

While we're on the subject of people not being able to write for the 
web: I heard a Christian minister once respond to someone asking about 
allegations of backwards Satanic chants being inserted into metal songs. 
His response was, "Don't worry about what they're saying backwards, when 
what they're saying forwards is so bad." My version: "Don't worry about 
the alt tags, when the rest of the site is so inaccessible." The 
accessibility issue has far more to do with people running graphics 
heavy websites, with tabular layout and with people not having a 
freaking clue about writing for the web medium.