Firefox, Alts & Titles, and Dreamweaver

chunter

I've just discovered that the ALT tag for images doesn't work as a tooltip in Firefox.
I thought all along it was a Firefox setting that was not set..

It must be a TITLE according to proper HTML & Firefox, I'm reliably informed.
Internet Explorer misuses it.

So do I have to edit all the tags in the source or does Dreamweaver have a properties box where I just type in the title.

It looks like it's gonna be a very unexciting Sunday.

John_Gray

I use the Firefox Popup ALT Attribute(s) extension to solve that problem. IE may well misuse the Alt Tag, but that makes it a de facto standard, doesn't it?!

John

Darksun

I've never had any problems with alt tags in Firefox... make sure you're properly formatting them.

Run your pages through http://validator.w3.org/ which should point out problems and give you pointers on how to fix them.

martindow

Hi

Alt tags are intended to display text when an image is missing for whatever reason and to help blind computer users who use text readers. Both IE anf Firefox do this. IE also displays alt text as a tool tip if you hover over the image; Firefox will display the text in a similar way if you add the text as a title tag in the coding.
There is a recent discussion on this here http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?p=268142&highlight=firefox+title+tag#268142

I'm not sure if more recent versions of Dreamweaver do this - I don't think mine does but I'm still on v3! You can of course put the code in by hand if you view html source for a page, but this would be a lot of work if you've got lots of images.

Chippy_Minton

There's a good explanation of the alt and title attributes (they're not tags!) here.

The only way of entering a title attribute for an image in Dreamweaver's Design View is by using the Quick Tag editor (select the image and press Ctrl-T).

There are a few time-saving options:

1. Use Find and Replace to create a title attribute for each img tag. You could use a simple F&R which adds title="", or a regular expression which creates title="thisValue" from alt="thisValue". Either way, test it on the current document before running it on the entire local site!

The Banish Tooltips extension basically does the same thing.

2. Use Javascript to dynamically generate the title attibute, as shown by this thread: http://groups.google.co.uk/group/macromedia.dreamweaver/browse_frm/thread/73a6f72209ab8fc0/05ec609c72aa602d

Let us know if you need help with any of the above.