g1smd - 4:11 pm on Mar 3, 2012 (gmt 0)

Using alt="" would also be fine.

I recently wondered why the word "base" sometimes appeared in the snippet for some pages of a site I recently worked on. I soon noticed that this was the alt text for the image used as a border around the page footer navigation list. The alt="base" now reads alt="" instead.

Use lower case for atribute names and add quotes around the value.