AltText Work Around

Last Modified: July 12, 2006

ePublisher Pro

The purpose of this article is to explain how to make the AltText attribute function correctly.

AltText is a common HTML element in many web pages, but it behaves differently in different browsers. Often, the alt attribute is incorrectly referred to as an image’s alt tag. It is not intended to provide "pop up" text or tooltip when a user's mouse hovers over the image, though AltText has been presented in this way in some web browsers; actually HTML's title attribute is intended for supplementary information that can be used in this way.

Internet Explorer passes the AltText attribute alt as a tooltip when a user’s mouse hovers over the image and we have many customers who expect this behavior when they are viewed in FireFox. The work around provided below will result in tooltip-style behavior of AltText in FireFox.

Some project modifications cannot be made through the GUI so we have created this article to provide steps for modifying the content.xml file using project target overrides. When you create a project target override you are only overriding the specific file that you want to modify; you are also ensuring that these modifications are not lost when installing updates to ePublisher Pro. For more information on how to perform a project target override, please see “Creating Project Target Overrides”.

Modifiying the content.xsl file:

<xsl:attribute name=”alt”>

<xsl:value-of-select=”$VarAltText”/>

</xsl:attribute>

<xsl:attribute name=”title”>

<xsl:value-of-select=”$VarAltText”/>

</xsl:attribute>

XHTML 1.0 CSS WAI-A