The Ballad of ALT TXT and HEIGHT and WIDTH Tags
All images should be coded with "alt text"
and height and width tags. The alt text plays a role in an attempt to
make the internet more accessible. I'm sure you've seen, when you allow your
cursor to hover over an image on a web page, a small line of text, often
describing the content of the image, will appear. This line of text affords vision-
impaired users of the internet to have your alt text spoken to them, if their system
has speech enabled. Additionally, people who might surf the internet with images
turned off will be able to get a better idea of the content of your site from the alt
text, as they may not be able to see your images.
Alt txt plays another important role that benefits the developer of
the web page/site. There are web spiders and robots continuously indexing web
sites. One of the ways these spiders or robots are able to determine the content
of your pages is by reading the alt txt you assign to your images. The better the
spiders and robots can understand your site's content the potentially higher
ranking you could receive from search engines. Therefore, the more descriptive
the alt txt of your images the better ranking on search engines you
could receive
By placing height and width tags on your images the faster the browser can
download your pages. When a web page is triggered to load, it scans ahead to
determine if there are any images present on the page. If the browser encounters
an image it looks next for its size. If no height and width values are present the
entire image must load into the browser before the remainder of the page can
load. If height and width values are ascribed to an image the browser can parcel
out the required area and continue down the page loading the remainder of the
content. This expedites the download process and in turn keeps your viewers
engaged.
Ballad Coding: