> Agreed. If the spec is more specific, maybe people will be less reluctant to
> use ALT and TITLE correctly. As it stands now, you can argue that IE is just

Only a very small proportion of the people writing web pages have
ever seen the specification, and even less of the people who specify that
there must be tooltips and they must work on Netscape 4.  (Most web
sites are specified in terms of a visual appearence, to be achieved on
popular software, not in the terms that HTML would like them specified;
HTML is merely a means of driving IE.)

It's generally true in the computing industry (and probably other
technical industries) that people don't read source documents.
Historically, this has been because they have been expensive and not
available through the normal book trade, or even through software
suppliers, but another problem is that they are written in technical
and precise language that scares people, and they prefer the popularised
versions from their book stall; increasingly they also prefer ones from
which they can simply copy examples without understanding them in detail.

A lot of web coding techniques are actually propagated simply by copying
bits of other people's web pages.

So, improviing the specification will mainly only get the message through
to the already converted.