Remember the dot wrote: I'm in the camp that considers them redundant. If the title isn't adding anything that isn't already visible, it's not helping. One suggestion that hasn't been mentioned is leaving these as titles in interactive settings (tooltip in web page) and using CSS to generate inline text in others (caption when printed). Online, images that have a tooltip could be distinguished from those that don't by some subtle effect, like maybe a thin border. Tim -- Tim Larson

2009/6/23 Remember the dot &lt;rememberthedot(a)gmail.com&gt;om>: This is actually only the case if you use the keyword 'thumb' or 'frame'. If you just do [[file:foo.jpg|this is my caption]], then you only get the "tooltip" (usually called "alt" text for images). <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt_attribute> You may be interested in reading this English Wikipedia guideline, as part of its Manual of Style: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Alternative_text_for_images> In short, alt text is important for accessibility. Also, for inline images without explicitly defined tooltips, the 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. Brianna -- They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment: http://modernthings.org/

On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 10:42 PM, Remember the dot&lt;rememberthedot(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: We should definitely leave them out. They're clearly redundant. I tried to do this before, but the code for this is horrible and I gave up. The code to pass image attributes from the parser to the appropriate image-generating class (mostly in Linker) needs to be scrapped and rewritten from scratch. On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 12:21 AM, Tim Larson&lt;larson(a)towncommons.com&gt; wrote: This would prohibit captions from containing markup, and not work in IE6 or IE7. Also, tooltips are not at all discoverable -- captions are a much better place to put info you expect people to actually read. On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 12:52 AM, Brianna Laugher&lt;brianna.laugher(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: We're discussing the title attribute, not the alt attribute. They're entirely different. Alt text is incorrectly rendered as a tooltip by Internet Explorer if no title attribute is present, for historical reasons, but no other browser does this AFAIK. I don't think any screen reader uses the title attribute in place of the alt attribute, either. Alt text can be set by itself now with [[Image:Foo.png|alt=xxx]], and this is currently the *only* way to set it for images with captions -- it's no longer the same as the caption by default. Could you explain how a title attribute that duplicates caption text is useful to *anyone*?