[Bug 7736] add tooltip attribute & keep title for other uses

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=7736


Nick Levinson <Nick_Levinson@yahoo.com> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
             Status|RESOLVED                    |REOPENED
         Resolution|INVALID                     |




--- Comment #3 from Nick Levinson <Nick_Levinson@yahoo.com>  2009-10-04 23:02:55 ---
> Wouldn't it be more useful to have an attribute for descriptive information that doesn't display as a tooltip at all, either in future or existing browsers? . . . .
Either approach would fulfill demand and either approach would have the same
problem of version compatibility. Since there's a general goal of keeping HTML
and other languages semantic, I think an attribute meant for tooltips should be
called tooltip, and something for multiple or residual uses should have a more
general name, for which title, already established, will do.

> title="" isn't allowed to be used like that . . . .
Okay, thus the need for more methods to satisfy needs.

Use for TTS seemed to be widespread a while back, causing a usability conflict
with tooltips use.

Both TTS and microformats have good use cases, and both are being shoehorned
into the title attribute. We should hand out a more comfortable shoe, i.e., a
more semantic attribute.

> Microdata uses <meta> for including data like this.
No, as to microformats. And that's complicated.

They don't use meta now (<http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard>, Property Notes,
n. 2, & Human vs. Machine readable, as accessed 10-3-09). The latter says, "If
an <abbr> element is used for a property, then the 'title' attribute (if
present) of the <abbr> element is the value of the property, instead of the
contents of the element, which instead provide a more human presentable version
of the value."

If they should use meta, they'll have to amend, but using meta in a head makes
parsing of an hCard microformat in a body much more complicated, because page
authors will have to write much larger heads and engines will have to apply
many more steps. Adding an attribute seems simpler.


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Received on Sunday, 4 October 2009 23:03:00 UTC