[9772] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: Line Breaks for ALT=TEXT
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (lilley)
Fri Feb 16 15:35:48 1996
From: lilley <lilley@afs.mcc.ac.uk>
To: paciello@shane.enet.dec.com
Date: Fri, 16 Feb 1996 20:28:17 +0000 (GMT)
Cc: www-talk@www10.w3.org
In-Reply-To: <9602161957.AA23101@us2rmc.zko.dec.com> from "paciello@shane.enet.dec.com" at Feb 16, 96 02:57:06 pm
Resent-From: www-talk@w3.org
Mike Paciello asks
> Is it possible to force a line break or carriage return when
> using the ALT= attribute for images?
No
> I've tried imbedding <br>'s or
> forcing <pre>'s, but that doesn't work.
The contents of alt is a string, not a (sub) document. You can't put
any markup or other formatting in there. This is a known limitation.
The same dumb limitation looks like being written into the client side
imagemap proposal which spyglass, netscape and microsoft are implementing
- alt text instead of real marked up text (as provided by Dave Ragett's
much superior FIG proposal (the real one, not the one in the INSERT draft).
> I want to force the line break because in some instances, providing lengthy
> text descriptions of an image for the visually impaired is required. However,
> from a visual appearance, the test flies right off the browser window.
... in some browser X. Split the problkem into two parts:
1) the HTML 2.0 spec inherits a design flaw from Mosaic such that you
can't put markup into textual alternatives. This we are stuck with,
and look like repeating.
2) (some browser) does not do line wrapping correctly with long alt text
strings. They probably never tested alt longer than say 80 characters. This
is readilly fixable by the browser vendor in question.
--
Chris Lilley, Technical Author and JISC representative to W3C
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