pageoneresults - 8:27 am on Dec 29, 2008 (gmt 0)

H2: Combining adjacent image and text links for the same resource
[w3.org...]

This example demonstrates a failure to apply this technique. An icon and text link are side by side. The text alternative for the image is the same as the text link beside it, leading to a "stutter" effect as the link is read twice.

Does your website "stutter"? Is the structure of your pages producing a replication of links and producing a "stuttering" effect for those using assistive technologies? And remember, the bots behave very similar to "assistive technology". They are blind and, they are deaf. Not to mention a few other things. :)

I've come across sites that are a stuttering nightmare. Something like this...

<tr>
<td><a href="/foo/123"><img src="/foo/images/123" width="120" height="60" alt="Foo 123" /></a></td>
<td rowspan="2"><a href="/foo/123">Product</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><a href="/foo/123">Product</a></td>
</tr>

Th-Th-Th-That's all folks!

^ That's three hrefs for one product all within the same block of html. This is not good practice and I would think produces less than optimal results from an indexing standpoint.

The above could easily be achieved by doing this...

<tr>
<td><a href="/foo/123"><img style="float:right;margin:0 0 .5em .5em;" src="/foo/images/123" width="120" height="60" alt="Foo 123" />Product</a><br />
Additional Product Information</td>
</tr>

You can also "associate" additional text with that linked image. :)

P.S. I know, I'm using <table>s in my examples. From what I've seen, that is still the common practice with many ecommerce sites and where you see much of the poorly implemented html. I've even seen CSS versions that are just as bad. ;)

[edited by: encyclo at 11:12 am (utc) on Dec. 29, 2008]