I’m regularly called upon to build shops, or very simple CMS systems with image upload facilities. This is fine, no complaints about that, but when you’re creating a CMS with image uploads, you always need to handle what happens when your user doesn’t upload an image – or what happens if an image is deleted.

Now I know it’s trivial to create an if statement to conditionally show an image or not, but it would be even more trivial if we could just add another attribute to X/HTML <img> tags to allow specifying an alternative image if no image is available. I know we already have the alt tag, to show text or help users with screen readers, but how about something like altimg=”image.gif” as a new attribute?  Then you could just set it up once and everytime an image tag is loaded without a src=”" attribute, or the file specified by the src=”" attribute is missing you have a fallback image.

It would mean marginally less typing for me, potentially saving me from the devastating effects of RSI! It could also result in a slightly better end-user experience abolishing those nasty placeholders in IE (and firefox if you have that setting switched on.

Perhaps this has already been suggested elsewhere, I don’t know, and to be honest I haven’t really followed the HTML 5 development so far, so if this (or something similar) is already in there a) please let me know b) great.