Should I forbid <FRAME> & <IFRAME>?

[Identities Infinite]

The only graphic I find which are not part of imagemap links is the one called Now It Has Come To This at http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/so_it_has_come_to_this.png. Interestingly it is a lossless image [TIF/TIFF and PNG are lossless but the latter is vector whereas the formers are raster].

[Tom T.]

The only graphic I find which are not part of imagemap links is the one called Now It Has Come To This at http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/so_it_has_come_to_this.png. Interestingly it is a lossless image [TIF/TIFF and PNG are lossless but the latter is vector whereas the formers are raster].

In plain English, you do or don't hear one bit of dialogue from each character:
"We ran out of cat food".
"So it has come to this."
and the caption beneath, which starts with "Pro tip"?

The alt-text, or tooltip in the standard version, is "Come to what? You. Me. This moment." Do you hear that?
That is what displays as boxed text beneath the cartoon panel box and caption if you use the mobile version.

By the way, it's now updated to Wednesday's version (updates Mon.- Wed. - Fri.), so the numbered direct link to the one in question is now
http://m.xkcd.com/1022/ for the mobile version, and
http://www.xkcd.com/1022/ for the original version with the tooltip.

[jeno]

It has been a long-standing pet peeve of mine when site designers do not include alt tags with their images. I tend to block a lot of unnecessary images, like the folder icons in Yahoo Mail for example. I don't like clutter, although clearly that is a minority viewpoint these days, as we have discussed elsewhere.
In some cases, I'd like to know quickly what the image is, so no alt tag is annoying.

It also seems that quite a few website coders do not realize Firefox (as well as other standards compliant browsers) does not recognize the alt attribute, and uses title (as god intended).

jeno

[Tom T.]

It has been a long-standing pet peeve of mine when site designers do not include alt tags with their images. I tend to block a lot of unnecessary images, like the folder icons in Yahoo Mail for example. I don't like clutter, although clearly that is a minority viewpoint these days, as we have discussed elsewhere.
In some cases, I'd like to know quickly what the image is, so no alt tag is annoying.

It also seems that quite a few website coders do not realize Firefox (as well as other standards compliant browsers) does not recognize the alt attribute, and uses title (as god intended).

Ha! It's been a pet peeve of mine for so long that it undoubtedly dates back to the days when I used the (non-standards-compliant) IE.

It seems that this site is still advising coders to use alt attribute (not tag, sorry):

When used, the image alt attribute displays a tooltip in Internet Explorer with the words contained in the image alt attribute for the website visitors when they place the mouse over the image. Not only is this helpful to your website visitors who use Internet Explorer, it is helpful for the visitors who have images turned off and it makes your site accessible...

This one is more up-to-date:

The title attribute specifies extra information about an element.
The information is most often shown as a tooltip text when the mouse moves over the element.

Yes, xkcd.com uses title:

Code: Select all

<div id="transcript" style="display: none">Person: We ran out of cat food.
Roommate: SO
Roommate: IT HAS COME TO THIS.
Protip: If you're not sure what to say, try "So it has come to this"--it creates instant dramatic tension and is a valid observation in literally any situation.

{{Title text: 'Come to what?' 'You. Me. This moment.'}}</div>

Thanks for refreshing my peeve memory, and yes, it's still a peeve if they don't include title.

[jeno]

The only graphic I find which are not part of imagemap links is the one called Now It Has Come To This at http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/so_it_has_come_to_this.png. Interestingly it is a lossless image [TIF/TIFF and PNG are lossless but the latter is vector whereas the formers are raster].

...Like GIF and TIFF, *PNG is a raster format*, which is to say, it represents an image as a two-dimensional array of colored dots (pixels). *PNG is explicitly not a vector format*,
i.e. one that can store shapes (lines, boxes, ellipses, etc.) and be scaled arbitrarily without any loss of quality (generally speaking). For that you probably want SVG or PostScript. (There are some private extensions to PNG that add vector information in addition to PNG's regular pixels - Macromedia's Fireworks does something along those lines, but no valid PNG may omit the pixel data.)
http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/pngintro.html

jeno

[Identities Infinite]

My mistake. I thought JPEG/JPG and TIF/TIFF were raster whilst BMP, GIF and PNG are vector. I know Kurzweil 1000 can only deal with I think raster formats as all OCR software but not vector. It does not recognise PNG and that is why I thought it was a vector format. Now it has me wondering.

[Tom T.]

@ I. I.: Wikipedia has a comprehensive comparison of graphics formats here, but it is a huge table, and might be inconvenient to navigate.

Article on Raster graphics.
Article on Vector graphics.

Critical point from the lattter article:

The W3C standard for vector graphics is SVG. The standard is complex and has been relatively slow to be established at least in part owing to commercial interests. Many web browsers now have some support for rendering SVG data but full implementations of the standard are still comparatively rare.

In recent years, Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) has become a significant format that is completely independent of the resolution of the rendering device, typically a printer or display monitor. SVG files are essentially printable text that describes both straight and curved paths, as well as other attributes....

@ jeno:

Not sure if you've picked up on this yet, but just in case, please know that Identities Infinite has zero vision, and relies on screen-reading tools with voice chips. So the discussion is about which images can be perceived by such tools, which in his case is an app called JAWS.

[Identities Infinite]

JAWS does not read graphics well. It recognises certain attributes of an image on a web page or document but Kurzweil 1000, my OCR software, is an actual image-to-text converter specifically for the blind and visually impaired. They have a Kurzweil 3000 which is something for dyslexic and other types of disabled people; that is not an OCR software I do not think. Kurzweil 1000 uses either the ScanSoft engine or the FineReader engine – both of which have their strengths and weaknesses. The program has an external tool to OCR digital images but for some reason all types of BMP, GIF and PNG file types are not even included in its capabilities. I must convert them to TIF using Microsoft Paint [because I have nothing better and they ruined it with the ribbon system in Windows 7 just like they ruined WordPad].

[Tom T.]

Kurzweil 1000 uses either the ScanSoft engine

I have used the ScanSoft program when for some reason I wanted to convert an image-based document into an equivalent text document. I agree that it is far from perfect. BMP isn't used so much these days because of the huge file size, but I'm surprised that GIF and especially PNG don't work. PNG is rapidly replacing JPG. I believe the reason is less loss. GIF is still seen at times, so that too is surprising.

They ruined WordPad? Eeek! That's a staple of my computing diet, being so much faster to open than Word or Open Office, and with no annoying page breaks, which is useful at times. Another reason to stick with XP. What exactly did they do with WordPad? It wasn't broke, so why "fix" it?

[Identities Infinite]

Have you ever tried to use versions of Microsoft Office newer than 2003? They ruined Paint and WordPad the same way they ruined all versions of Office after 2003: with the dreaded ribbon interface. I despise it no matter the program.

[Tom T.]

Have you ever tried to use versions of Microsoft Office newer than 2003?

I never again used Microsoft Office once I discovered that Open Office was 100% free of charge, and worked as well or better than M S, with a smaller footprint, and complies with international standards as well as being able to work with M S formats. It has a better safety record and is open-source software. You might check it out to see how its accessibility compares to M S.

I don't know what a ribbon interface is.

[Identities Infinite]

The ribbon interface is by far the worst implementation Microsoft has ever made. Instead of the left ALT key activating menus, Left and Right Arrow keys navigating between them and Up and Down Arrow keys navigating within them, they have this sorry excuse for menus. In fact they are not menus; there is this upper ribbon and lower ribbon I think. On these ribbons are drop-down menus on which I can press Space then Down Arrow to activate. I absolutely loathe all these ribbon systems and that might not be their technical name for all I know.

[Tom T.]

Wow, that is *horrible*! Wikipedia has an article on the ribbon, which is in fact the technical term for it. There is a screenshot of the Word 2010 GUI. It pains me to see it. You would enjoy the article, as it's mostly negative and critical, in line with your opinion.

I customized my own Open Office program extensively. One can remove all icons and replace with text equivalents. Being a fast reader myself, you can imagine how that benefits both JAWS and me. The top toolbar in the text program has the following menu entries, in plain text:

File Edit View Format Table Tools Window Help

The second and only other toolbar has the following:

Save [Combo box for font type] [Combo box for font size] Zoom "Font Color" "Page preview" (for seeing how it will look when printed), "Print file directly" (avoids the printer dialog box and prints with the user's chosen default settings), Bold, Italic, etc. -- all in simple block text. I'm sure that JAWS could read them directly.

And as you mentioned elsewhere, i have removed many unneeded entries from within individual menus. This is easy with their GUI, using Tools, Customize, Menus. You can also use the customize function on toolbars themselves, and on keyboard shortcuts. Check it out!

[Identities Infinite]

That sounds really nice. I use Jarte Plus which is a mix between WordPad and Office without the ribbons. If ever I need to have more capabilities I will check that. Check Jarte if ever you get tired of OpenOffice or if it is too much for your needs. Jarte enables me to customise the entire menu layout and a lot of other things. The technical support from the developer is also first-rate. The only huge downside is it does not yet support Unicode and as wrong as it may be I am becoming impatient for only that feature. He said it will take time and I gave it a little more than a year. I hope it will surface this year.

[Tom T.]

That sounds really nice. I use Jarte Plus which is a mix between WordPad and Office without the ribbons. If ever I need to have more capabilities I will check that. Check Jarte if ever you get tired of OpenOffice or if it is too much for your needs. Jarte enables me to customise the entire menu layout and a lot of other things. The technical support from the developer is also first-rate. The only huge downside is it does not yet support Unicode and as wrong as it may be I am becoming impatient for only that feature. He said it will take time and I gave it a little more than a year. I hope it will surface this year.

The only feature that I see as useful to me in Jarte Free versus Wordpad is the spell-checker. I still have the old WordPad, not the "ruined" one you mentioned, but I have to paste it into Open Office for spell-check. However, if it's going into a browser, as with these messages or with other things I post on the Web, Firefox's spell-checker does the job.

I'd rather not pay for something I can get for free, but if Jarte Plus works best for you, of course that's the way to go.

Speaking of which, congratulations on the free Hush for one year, but did you ever get past the CAPTCHA issue?
And at the end of the year, is four dollars a month really too much to pay? It's $49.95 per *year*, not per month [wink].
Perhaps at the end of the year, they'll offer you a free renewal.