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The W3C Standard describes, that to a HTML-Images tag () there is a must-attribute “alt” that describes the alternate text if the images can not be displayed. MS Internet Explorer also uses this attribute to show a so called tooltip, this is a text that is showed when you move your mouse over an element (in this case over the image).

Other browsers use the title-attribute instead, because other elements don’t have the alt-attribute, but they are also able to show a tool-tip (e.g. anchor-Tags).

Now there are many many many many (did I already figure out that I mean many?) developers or web designer, who do not care about that kind of stuff. They test their pages with IE and that’s it. An example for such a page is the SAP booking page in the company I work for. Many people get angry because they don’t use IE and don’t get this tooltip. On our SAP site this is really annoying because the whole navigation is made by some icons with meaningless look so the tooltip is the only way to know what the button really does. Therefore there are user that changed back to IE because they thought Firefox behaves wrong. I wrote this little 5-line script to copy the content of the alt-attribute to the title-attribute. Install it using the Firefox-Extensions Greasemonkey, and that’s it.

My Images-Title User-JavaScript

More information about Greasmonkey and how to program with it on the Dive Into Greasemonkey page.