Dustin wrote:
> On 8/17/05, *David Woolley* <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk 
> <mailto:david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>> wrote:
> 
> 
>      >        <img src="enter.gif">
> 
>     As well as being off topic, that's not valid HTML!
> 
> 
> How is that not valid HTML? If you mean the @alt attribute or the 
> @longdesc attribute is missing, it isn't valid due to accessibility 
> reasons. Accessibility is mandatory in some countries, but in others, it 
> is not. Even if you don't have one or both of those attributes, it is 
> still considered standard-compliant code, depending on your location in 
> the world and your personal coding preferences. If you omit them, most 
> user-agents will not stop rendering the page (and/or the image). The 
> image will still be rendered usually, regardless of whether the tag's 
> contents consist of the image's path.

The @alt attribute is required as per the relevant specification [1]. 
That's why it's not valid HTML. From the specification:

alt         %Text;         #REQUIRED -- short description --


Jasper

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/objects.html#h-13.2