David Scotson

In answer to your first question, it is sometimes appropriate to leave alt text empty. The user icon is (I believe) one of those cases, as the user's name is the only useful textual replacement for the image, and the icon is usually accompanied by that information anyway.

The entire subject of accessible images and various related concerns are covered in depth by Chapter 6 of Joe Clark's Building Accessible Websites, which you can read on-line.

In particular the section about half-way down entitled Identical alt and subsequent words covers the situation of user icons..

Warning: I believe there is a reference and link to an adult site in that chapter.

And talking of odd, the Markdown format seems to be stripping out Javascript even when it's escaped i.e. stripping the input rather than the output (and/or ignoring the difference between an escaped opening bracket and an unescaped one).

The online test dingus doesn't seem to do that.

And I'm still confused about the unclosed font tag. The bit of HTML is in your header, where it displays the current date using javascript. When I view source I only see this opening tag just before the javascript function for writing out the date:

<td align="left" valign="top"><span class="notenav">

<div align="right">
<font class="tiny">

But when I save the page to disk the following appears directly after the closing script tag:

August 9, 2004
</font></div>
<font class="tiny">              </font></span>
<font class="tiny">        </font>

Very odd.

In the file called "styles.php", on line 121:

font,th,td,p { font-weight: normal; font-size: 12px; color : #000000; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif }

remove the bit at the start of the line that says font. As the whole point of the font tag is to override the styles locally where it is used it doesn't make sense to assign a CSS style to it.

edit: scratch that, I don't know what's happening. Sorry

edit again: on third thoughts you appear to have an unclosed font tag, on the line that says:

<font class="tiny">


Either delete it or match it with a closing </font> tag.