It is much better to put descriptive names. Look again at the examples we gave earlier. You'll see that descriptive titles were used for each ALT tag. I'm not worried about supporting Lynx Quite a statement. Having fancy awesome graphics is only part of the battle.
People quickly grow tired of waiting for graphics to download.
First of all, always provide a text alternative to graphic menus. On the IBM, you can use Photoshop to accomplish this task as well. General rule of thumb is to keep graphics under 25k. We prefer to have most of our graphics at the 15k or smaller size if there are a lot of them on a page.