What are you doing, firefox?!

[DMKA]

Umm....Firefox has always done that for me.

[Levian]

Only hockey moms use alt text anyway.

[Peegee]

The thing is Firefox has classically been using the title attribute to show tooltips, while IE has used alt. Neither is completely semantically correct to use as tooltips but title is still miles better than alt, which is supposed to be a text to describe the image's content to act as a replacement for the image to browsers that do not display images, screen readers and such tools, or if the image does not load.

[/web design nerd]

Exactly. Nobody should see alt text.


Let's test something. This following image has an alt text of 'cl_out' and a title of 'clout's smilie':



so it seems like firefox shows title text if it exists, and alt text if it doesn't? This only has alt text:



ugh, this sucks.

[~*~Celes~*~]

I have no idea what any of you are talking about.

*Also uses firefox but isn't sure what's going on*

[Krelian]

Exactly. Nobody should see alt text.


Let's test something. This following image has an alt text of 'cl_out' and a title of 'clout's smilie':

:ezpimp:

so it seems like firefox shows title text if it exists, and alt text if it doesn't? This only has alt text:

:ezpimp:

ugh, this sucks.

I wonder when this was changed. When you search for information you run into countless websites explaining Firefox's correct behavior not to display ALT texts, but I have yet to find one that explains when it was changed

[rubah]

My pet theory is that it is eoff because it hasn't done it on any other sites and also there isn't a big 'WTF' from the collective nerds as a whole.

[Krelian]

I think you are halfway right. I think it has to do with vBulletin. I checked some other websites and found there was no tooltip on any of them, except one that had a vBulletin board running.

If you check the second "" smiley from Pureghetto that shouldn't have a title attribute you'll find it actually has. I suppose vBulletin automatically copies the alt attribute to the title attribute to mimic IE's behavior.

[o_O]

Ok, so I think the title attribute is added in via a function in one of the vBulletin javascript functions which specifically copies alt text to title text. That means it's applying the title attribute after the page source is downloaded, explaining why there's no title in the source code and why the title appears if you inspect the element.

EDIT: Ok, yes, these two functions exist in <a href="http://forums.eyesonff.com/clientscript/vbulletin_global.js">the vbulletin_global.js</a> script. Here you go:

// Substantially deobfuscated :p
function child_img_alt_2_title(A) {
  var C = A.getElementsByTagName("img");
  for(var B = 0; B < C.length; B++) {
    img_alt_2_title(C[B])
  }
}

function img_alt_2_title(A) {
  if(!A.title && A.alt != "") {
    A.title = A.alt;
  }
} 

[crono_logical]

I guess it's vBulletin messing with your minds, not Firefox

[Rantz]

It was a bit of a scare!

[rubah]

I specifically asked you if there was any arcane javascript that could the culprit and you said no >:[

[Peegee]

I specifically asked you if there was any arcane javascript that could the culprit and you said no >:[

Mike likes to mess with you.

[Baloki]

Operator, I need an exit.

There's one just the other side of Central Park.

[crono_logical]

It's always been this way, you big fruit.

Umm....Firefox has always done that for me.

I specifically asked you if there was any arcane javascript that could the culprit and you said no >:[

It's PHP doing it anyway, not javascript