smackfoo.com | I find your lack of faith disturbing.

I’d like to make a small public announcement.

If you develop code to do anything with web-based images, particularly involving Wordpress or TXP plugins, please do the universe a favour and ensure you follow both XHTML and Usability guidelines and make sure the ALT= attribute is included in any URI mark-up.

The W3C loosly define the ALT attribute as:

Specifying alternate text assists users without graphic display terminals, users whose browsers don’t support forms, visually impaired users, those who use speech synthesizers, those who have configured their graphical user agents not to display images, etc.

By not including it, you are potentially making life and the Internet just that little bit more bland — it’s also an instant FAIL for any XHTML standards.

A typical block of code for an image, following the ‘close enough’ philosophy:

<img src="demo.jpg" title="demo screen shot" />

I mean, just look at the amount of difference the following would make.

<img src="demo.jpg" title="demo screen shot" alt="screen grab as per paragraph 3" />

Not doing so hurts the Internet, it hurts me because it’s one more thing I have to do¹ to make sure content follows standards and it’s turning down the vibrancy by removing imagery information from a part of the online community.

Save the planet, use ALT.

1. manually adding alt=” tags sucks (↩)

So you’re running a flavour of linux for the AMD 64bit platform - such as Novell’s Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop ((.. which coincidentally has just won the ‘Best Linux Desktop’ category in Infoworld Technology of the Year Awards )) and you’re about to go visit a frequently used flash powered website, so you launch firefox and.. oh noes, no flash.

So of course one thinks “no worries, I’ll just install it..” and that would be that, right?

Wrong!

Up until recently if one used a 64 bit linux operating system, one was, quite literally, shit out of luck. You see Macromedia Adobe doesn’t ((.. or certainly didn’t up until recently.)) believe 64bit Linux exists, oh no, it’s some nasty rumour spread by Microsoft employee’s as some kind of sick in-joke.

But.. all is not lost - indeed this slipped under the radar and I only happened across it entirely by mistake. Damn fine mistake, indeed the best one I’ve made today.

Having just upgraded to
Firefox 2.0 RC3, I note with some amusement that the ‘bug’ affecting firefox’s default
google homepage has resurfaced.
I’m not exactly sure when this new concept of using an ever so bright neon yellow sign that screams “help help, I’m being hijacked!” came into being, but I’m pretty sure it will be […]

After a long stint in a closet collecting dust I’ve finally found a use for my aging xbox.

It all started earlier today when I was crashing around in a pre-caffeine state and heard a rather nasty crunch. The thought process was pretty much as follows:

Where’s my other sock gone? .. *crunch* ..
Hmm.. where the hell […]

You have to be kidding me.. before I begin, this post may contain content that might be offensive to advertisers and small children..
Evolutionary theft
So not only is bitacle.org cramming advertising into every spare pixel, they’ve now added ‘digg this’ to their every-evolving quest to squeeze every last cent out of ’stolen’ content.

Now, whilst you might […]

Does this look at all familiar?
If you thought it was only ever the
uber-popular kids on the block that have
content scraped, without permission and then used to make money without the blog author’s knowledge - you would be wrong.
The art of
splogging is nothing new — spam comments and advertising attempting to pretend it’s […]