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I've just been reading a thread from my favourite forum - WebProWorld - which is all about how to improve your website's rankings in search engines, and a multitude of other issues related to browsers, servers and all the paraphernalia of the internet.
This particular thread was about the merits of using alt and title attributes in images and whether you should have one or other or both, what text you should put in them, and so on.
You don't need to know the details, just that there was a lot of opinion and polite disagreement. But no resolution of the question.
Now alt and title are part of the HTML language which, as an engineered computer language, is completely specified and not open to opinion. However, these attributes are processed by indexing algorithms to help to determine the ranking of the pages on which they appear.
In short there is a precise (though possibly complicated) answer to the question.
And yet, a million forums around the internet contain thousands of threads addressing questions just like this one.
Why is there so much debate and opinion on issues that should be simple to resolve?
In the days when computing was an engineering discipline, if you had a question about FORTRAN or COBOL (say), you asked the senior programmer and he told you the answer. If you were the senior programmer, you opened the manual at the right page and read the answer. There was no need for a forum or a web 2.0 or any other marketing froth because the answer was there in black and white.
The current sorry state of affairs is a self-inflicted wound - the result of the gradual takeover of IT by businessmen and marketeers. The shrieks replaced the geeks when one William Gates infected the world's PCs with a virus that has been spreading ever since. Gates' innovation: a program to generate profit, not progress.
And so to the answer - it's better for the revenue of search engine companies and the industry that hangs off them to hide the information that would answer these detailed technical questions. The reasons advanced include 'to protect commercial sensitivity' or 'to protect the integrity of search results'. Which leaves the way clear for link farmers and others to game the search engines. A modern example of Bacon's 16th century dictum that 'knowledge is power'.
Of course, such obscurantism extends far beyond software companies (who are mere novices at this). The secrecy that hides the machinations of corporates has the same genesis as the secrecy that shrouds your average police state: it protects the elite.
Yes, there is a definite answer to the question 'do I use alt tags and title tags in images?' and all the millions of other similar queries that bounce around the forums. And, no, you are not about to find out what it is as it's better for 'the industry' that the manuals remain tightly closed.
This particular thread was about the merits of using alt and title attributes in images and whether you should have one or other or both, what text you should put in them, and so on.
You don't need to know the details, just that there was a lot of opinion and polite disagreement. But no resolution of the question.
Now alt and title are part of the HTML language which, as an engineered computer language, is completely specified and not open to opinion. However, these attributes are processed by indexing algorithms to help to determine the ranking of the pages on which they appear.
In short there is a precise (though possibly complicated) answer to the question.
And yet, a million forums around the internet contain thousands of threads addressing questions just like this one.
Why is there so much debate and opinion on issues that should be simple to resolve?
In the days when computing was an engineering discipline, if you had a question about FORTRAN or COBOL (say), you asked the senior programmer and he told you the answer. If you were the senior programmer, you opened the manual at the right page and read the answer. There was no need for a forum or a web 2.0 or any other marketing froth because the answer was there in black and white.
The current sorry state of affairs is a self-inflicted wound - the result of the gradual takeover of IT by businessmen and marketeers. The shrieks replaced the geeks when one William Gates infected the world's PCs with a virus that has been spreading ever since. Gates' innovation: a program to generate profit, not progress.
And so to the answer - it's better for the revenue of search engine companies and the industry that hangs off them to hide the information that would answer these detailed technical questions. The reasons advanced include 'to protect commercial sensitivity' or 'to protect the integrity of search results'. Which leaves the way clear for link farmers and others to game the search engines. A modern example of Bacon's 16th century dictum that 'knowledge is power'.
Of course, such obscurantism extends far beyond software companies (who are mere novices at this). The secrecy that hides the machinations of corporates has the same genesis as the secrecy that shrouds your average police state: it protects the elite.
Yes, there is a definite answer to the question 'do I use alt tags and title tags in images?' and all the millions of other similar queries that bounce around the forums. And, no, you are not about to find out what it is as it's better for 'the industry' that the manuals remain tightly closed.
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