HTML 4.01 Transitional and images

[electricocean]

is the alt attribute needeed in html? it apears to work fine w/o it, but when i go to validate my site it says alt atribute needed?
why?

electricocean

[tedster]

There is a wide gulf between what "works" and what is valid. This is because when we talk about what "works" we usually mean what Internet Explorer (and maybe a few other visual browsers) will display.

But there are MANY other kinds of user agents - some are text only, and some are aural browsers for visually impaired and so on. In other words, not every user agent can display images. So the standard says, use an alt tag so that the HTML can be used by non-visual agents.

There are great sections of the world where broadband is rare (the horror of it!) and even dial up accounts may be low bandwidth and perhaps very expensive. People in regions like that may access most websites with images turned off intentionally = to save money and time. I do this myself at times, even on broadband, when all I want is information and I could care less about anyone's pretty pictures.

Because of these situations, alwyas including an alt attribute in an image tag is a good idea, even if it weren't part of the standard. If the image is not informative but only part of the trim or whatever, you can (and should) use a null attribute, alt=""

It's a good final check for any website before launch to see how it holds up functionally with images turned off.