RE: ToolTips are a Technique & have no place in HTML5 [was Re: [Bug 9589]]

Sean Hayes wrote:
>
> So in my mind the 'tooltip' semantic is a reminder or hint of what the
> item in question does or is, it implies nothing about how or when that
> information should be available. One possible 'tooltip' behaviour is
> that it pops up when I move the mouse over the item in question, but
> that’s just a convention (and not a very accessible one).

Agreed. As I re-read Gregory Rosmaita's change Proposal for Summary 
(http://www.w3.org/html/wg/wiki/ChangeProposals/summary_element) [which came 
from the discussion around tables and table summaries] it strikes me that he 
was saying essentially the same thing (Greg?).


>
> Now the semantic is in a sense universal and could be in the spec, the
> behaviour is not and it shouldn’t be in the spec. If an alternate
> browser had a completely different mechanism to indicate the presence
> and present the hint, then that should be acceptable.

Exactly. This would be better for Adaptive Technology such as screen 
readers, or platforms (such as touch-screens, as David Singer noted).


>
> <summary> would be a good replacement for the tooltip side effect of
> title, if it were not restricted to being in a <details> element.
>
> For example if I could write:
> <a href="bogof.html" >
>   <summary>Buy one get one free pizza offer<summary>
>    <img src="BigPizza.jpg" alt="Big Pizza company logo">
> </a>
>

Yes, I agree. Perhaps this should be advanced as a Change Proposal. 
(de-linking a summary element from details)



> <details> is a container wrapper to allow the UA have a standard way to
> animate CSS display:hidden and show/hide its contents. So <summary> is
> in effect a tooltip/legend/caption/ for the content of the <detail>. But
> I'm not sure how one would markup the example above with <details>. I
> don’t want to wrap the <a> or <img> with <details> because I don’t want
> my marketing offer to ever be hidden. If I wrap the <details> around the
> <summary> only, then it's not capturing the semantic that the summary is
> of the link.
>
> I don’t know how widely <summary> has been implemented yet, or if there
> are any conventions or expectations of its behaviour.

I don't think it has been widely implemented yet either.

Hmmm.....

JF

Received on Monday, 26 April 2010 23:00:33 UTC