Topic: Case Study - A Sharper Image

Iain works on the Web development team for a prominent community college system in the Southwest part of the United States. He was assigned to create several new Web pages, most of which would include detailed images. These images would aid navigation and provide vital registration instructions for the college students.

Iain was experienced with XHTML and did not feel it was important to spend time validating all code because he was very busy. After creating and posting the new pages however, Iain began receiving complaints from students who used text-based browsers. These students complained that they could not see (or hear) the registration instructions.

To solve this problem, Iain added the alt attribute to each tag to describe each image with text. Although it would have taken him more time to include the alt attribute in his initial page development, Iain found that the alt attribute resolved the complaints.

discuss the following issues that might arise when incorporating images in Web pages:

Most people use browsers that support images. Why is it important to support all browser types in this situation?
How could validation have saved Iain development time? What other advantages would have come from initial validation?