Re: Accessibility: ALT for blank images with " " or ""?

"Jason Judge" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]

Sorry - message sent too early.

> Just from an XML point of view, I believe parsed attributes are trimmed of
> spaces anyway, so I would not rely on a space doing anything different to
an
> empty attribute, unless you want to include the space in a CDATA section.
>
> Here is just one reference:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/xmlsdk/htm/
xml_concepts_9mzp.asp

There will be notes on trimming in the W3C docs too (but I can never find my
way around them;).

For that reason, I just use an empty string.

Having said that, I think it does all depend on the DTD and the browser.
IE5.x will pop up a box for an anchor 'title' attribute full of spaces,
Mozilla will not. Neither browser trims spaces from a title attribute. So it
all comes down to whether the XHTML specs state whether the alt attribute of
an image tag should be trimmed or not. If it should, then I guess the page
readers should not be distinguishing between a space and an empty alt
attribute. But I'm not an expert in these matters, so that could be all
wrong ;-)

-- JJ