steve kwan user experience designer

Popup ALT Attributes: A simple but incredibly useful Firefox extension

(January 19th, 2006 - 3:05PM)

This is the Firefox extension I've been dreaming of!

W3C enthusiasts will tell you that HTML's ALT attribute is used to provide text that will displayed when an image cannot be loaded or viewed. Microsoft decided to break this convention. As you've surely noticed, when you use Internet Explorer and you hover your mouse cursor over an image, a little tooltop appears that gives you an explanation of the image. That's the contents of the ALT attribute. It's incredibly useful that IE does this, but it's not the correct behaviour of the ALT attribute.

However, because of IE's ubiquitous nature it's not uncommon for users to expect other Web browsers to do the same. Firefox does not display ALT text in this manner; instead it uses the TITLE attribute, which is what the W3C standard specifies. Unfortunately, most Web developers don't bother to specify TITLE attributes on their images; they only specify ALT. This can be very frustrating for users if Web developers have built websites under the assumption that users can see ALT text as tooltips. I will admit that I'm guilty of this sin; just check out my photo gallery to see. All of my thumbnail images have detailed descriptions as ALT text.

Right or wrong, it's incredibly frustrating that Firefox doesn't display ALT attributes as tooltips. But this extension changes that.

Download Popup ALT Attributes