On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 8:37 AM, Roan Kattouw roan.kattouw@gmail.com wrote:
2009/6/23 Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com:
Also, for inline images without explicitly defined tooltips, the
image name is used as the tooltip even though it is also shown in the URL when mousing over the image. Neither of these automatic tooltips are really useful, and they slow down page load time on image-heavy pages.
They might not be useful for you, but they are useful for others. On what basis do you say they slow down page load time? I would be surprised to find that supplying or not supplying alt text made any difference.
You're right, this sounds like absolute nonsense. The time it takes to set and/or display these tooltips is nothing compared to the time it takes to download and display the images themselves. Image-heavy pages load slowly because they contain a lot of images (surprise!), most other factors are negligible.
I thought someone might say that. Perhaps I care more about performance because I've had to endure several insufferably slow connections, and I don't want to waste limited bandwidth downloading redundant tooltips. Sometimes I even turn images off to improve speed, but the tooltips, as part of the page, must still be downloaded.
In any case, as others have pointed out, there are more reasons than performance why the redundant tooltips are a bad idea.
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