April 06, 2004
Text Images Rant
You have seen them on websites, (ebay is the biggest abuser), you may have clicked on them, search Engines don’t like them, results can be cheap looking. I am talking about text images. I visited real.com the other day, they have great looking site design but glaring at they top of their screen was a link that was off-center with the rest of the navigation, the text underline made it obvious that this was not standard html text but an image, plus it had no alt tag. What made it worse was the cheap little american flag icon next to that looked as if it had been saved over and over again. Why would a big company like real do this to there website. There are several websites out there today that use this technique, why, maybe it is quicker for them to update an image than html or their programming is built that way. Needless to say, it is a bad practice. Reasons why not to use text images.
- Longer downloads - The real network image weighs 360 bytes, if done in html it would only weigh 136 (113 bytes for the image + 23 bytes for the text).
- Search engines index text better than alt tags from images.
- You don’t have to worry about the kerning or fractional widths setting in photoshop to make it look like a real text.
- More accessible for disabled users.
- Users with cleartype (windows) or quartz(mac) turned on will notice a difference between the two.
Now I am not referring to the use of images for headlines or small type in some intances, but to the uses of text as images that could have been done in html just the same.
Blake