Using Height / Width and Alt Tags
What's nice for Web users is when they hit a page that loads quickly. What's a drag is a page that takes forrrrrrrevvvvverrrrrr to load. Been there? One way to speed up the loading of your pages is to add HEIGHT and WIDTH sizes to your image tags. This requires that you have a piece of software that can tell you the dimensions of an image. Two good ones are: JPEGView for Macintosh (click to download) and LView Pro for Windows (ditto). You may need Stuffit Expander for Mac or Windows to expand the files that you download.
Once you've started the software of your choice:
- open the file you want to size.
- look for where they talk about "statistics" or "numbers X numbers."
- write down the size of the file (width first usually).
For more info go to the Yale Style Manual pages dealing with image tags.
Alt Tags
If people still want to view your pages without the graphics (maybe their middle schooler is tying up the faster modem), it's nice if you provide "alt" (alternate) tags describing what the images are. This is most important when the image is a button.
example:
- Go to
here's the link tag:
<A HREF=http://www.yahoo.com/picks/#list><IMG ALIGN=MIDDLE SRC=yahoo.gif border=1 alt="Yahoo's Pick of the Week List"><P>
So if people have the graphics off they would see:
- Go to
note: You only have to use quotes if your "alt" is more than one word long. Also, we had to reduce the size of the font back to the default of "3" for the whole title to fit.
