Why would it hurt? Just stick to W3 recommendations and use it wisely, for accessibility reasons that is.
Wanna see the purpose of alt tags? Turn off image viewing in your browser and view your site. That's what SE's see and people that browse with text browsers see and handicapped people see.
Why would you use an alt tag with -*- anyway aside from the fact it looks like a text smiley face of some sort. Put a keyword in that alt tag space that describes the picture instead.
I have a caegories box with a line separating the different categories. The alt tag for the line is products categories it would look category 1 product categories category 2 product categories and so on... I would rather have category 1 -*- category 2 -*- and so on..
I know there arent alot of people that use browsers without pics but the problem is that I get a high density for the alt tag I use for this line. If I use a -*- it would look better if someone was viewing without pics but I would then gat a high density for the -*- The code is dynamically generated and i have alot of these lines on the page. What to do ???
That makes sense. I don't see why that should be an issue. I can't imagine it would cause any penalties.
That's what I'd think too. Your plan is probably a good one. If the site has good content, the alt tags should just be ignored.