alt="$thread[icontitle]" : Question

[MRGTB]

I've installed a few mods, and now I'm finding on my portal page when I hover my mouse over both my News and Thread icons posted there. The ALT message being shown is now a path name like this "$thread[icontitle]" instead of a message for some strange reason.

What changes do I need to make in my portal.php file to fix this problem. I have done a search in the file and found therfe are two ALT titles entries for both News Icons and Thread icons. Which I have listed below.

Thread:
alt="$thread[icontitle]">';
alt="'.$thread[icontitle].'">';

News:
alt="$news[icontitle]">';
alt="'.$news[icontitle].'">';

[Princeton]

ALT is used for alternate text (if image viewing is disabled in application show alternate text).

Many people confuse the ALT attribute with the TITLE attribute -- TITLE will produce a tooltip. NOTE: IE displays the ALT as a tooltip but that was done because of compatibility issues with early Netscape browsers. This is not the correct way of using the ALT attribute.

Another way to look at it:
ALT values are parsed by search engines while TITLE values are ignored.
So, if you have many icons on the page with NOTEPAD (alternate text on notepad icon) you are actually hurting your SEO.

you should just leave the ALT empty - as the icon seldom has nothing to do with the message

For example:
{Notepad} Star Trek MMO Exclusive Interview

[MRGTB]

So you saying, search engines don't get thread titles, but do get ALT name title. Meaning if I have 5 threads all using the same Notpad ALT icon text. All the threads would not be indexed by the search engine because it would asume there all the same threads because of the ALT title on the icon.

[Princeton]

no that's not what I am saying...
threads will still be indexed; but, you are making it harder for people to find the page by using 'words' that are not relevant to the subject at hand

NOTE: when I say TITLE, I mean title="title of link or image" vs. alt="alternate text of image"

So, the TITLE value will usually be ignored by search engines while the ALT value will be parsed along with any other text on the page

To confuse you even more
ALT value are usually picked up by screen readers while the TITLE value is not
eg. A text reader would read "notepad Star Trek MMO Exclusive Interview" to the listener. I would think that would confuse the listener compared to "Star Trek MMO Exclusive Interview".

Search engines will completely ignore the below as code:

<img src="notepad.gif" alt="" title="Notepad icon" width="16" height="16" />

Search engines will read "notepad" as text:

<img src="notepad.gif" alt="notepad" width="16" height="16" />

Another tip:
always use width/height on all images -- your pages will display faster