Height, Width, and Alt Tags

Height and Width Tags
Web users like pages that load quickly. It's a drag when a page takes forrrrrrrevvvvverrrrrr to load. Been there? One way to speed up the loading of your pages is to add HEIGHT and WIDTH to your image tags. This requires that you have a piece of software that can tell you the dimensions of an image. You can open a graphic in Netscape and the dimensions will be displayed in the title bar. You can open the Paint program that comes with Windows and check the image attributes. You can use JPEGView for Macintosh. You can also download a graphics software from Shareware.com

Once you've started the software of your choice:

1. Open the file you want to size.

2. Look for where they talk about statistics, attributes, or "numbers X numbers."

3. Write down the size of the file making sure you designate which is width and which is height.

For more info go to the Yale Style Manual pages dealing with height and width image tags.

Alt Tags
Alt tags have been increasingly important in order to comply with laws which require some web sites be accessible to the visually impaired. The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) has been at the forefront of developing standards and tools. You might want to start off with their Quick Tips page. Want to test your personal knowledge on the topic of accessibility? Check out this quiz! Want to check your web page to see how well it complies? Check it out using Bobby, a free software tool for checking a single page.

Anyway, back to alt tags... example:

Go to

here's the link tag:

<A HREF=http://www.yahoo.com/picks/#list><IMG ALIGN=MIDDLE SRC=yahoopicks.gif border=1 alt="Yahoo's Pick of the Week List"><P>

People using a special reader would hear something like "Graphic, Yahoo's Pick of the Week List.

note: You have to use quotes if your "alt" is more than one word long.

First posted 1997. Last modified Monday November 26, 2007 © 2008 Copyright AT&T Intellectual Property. All rights reserved. AT&T and the AT&T logo are trademarks of AT&T Intellectual Property. This site contains links to public sites whose content and language do not fall under the jurisdiction of AT&T. The views and opinions expressed at these sites are not those of AT&T. Please read our Disclaimer.