border=“0” alt=""> is an HTML fragment from an image tag. When you use <img> to insert an image in an HTML page, you can define “alt” text to describe the image to people who use screen readers or browse with image downloading turned off. This is typically done to make web pages accessible to the visually handicapped and to assist in keyword indexing of images. The border=“0” part is used to turn of the link outline that appears around an image when it’s used as a link. If you put an <img> tag inside an <a> tag to make it clickable, most browsers will display the image with a blue border (or whatever color is defined for use in text links). This is usually aesthetically undesirable, so you turn off the link borders with border=“0”.
If you’re seeing this, it probably means the HTML you’re viewing has errors that are causing the fragments to be displayed instead of parsed, or someone tried to insert an image in a post (which isn’t allowed on this board). Of course, it may have some conversational meaning which is one big swoosh to me.
These are called attributes for the HTML <img> tag. Normally, when an image is used as a link, browsers will create a border around it. The “border=‘0’” part eliminates it. “Alt” gives a textual description for the image, so if the image doesn’t load (or somebody is surfing with an all-text browser such as Links), you can still see what it is supposed to be. It is a bad practice not to set it.
They probably should have generated the text form of the emoticon as the alt attribute, but I doubt that VB would consider it a very high prioroty request.