Re: ToolTips: bug or feature?

Joshue O Connor writes:

> Smylers wrote:
>
> >  [Josh wrote:]
> 
> > > Davids suggested tooltip attribute ain't a bad idea. It would remove
> > > any ambiguity for authors as in @tooltip="visual tooltip",
> > > @title="useful for additional information for not visual users",
> > > @alt="alternate textual description here".
> > 
> > And having something as presentational as tooltip output being
> > specified in HTML creates problems for all those user-agents which
> > can't include tooltips.
> 
> Just out of curiosity, could you list a few?

Lynx, for one.  Probably W3M and Links as well, given how similar they
are (but I don't have time to check right now).

I have no personal experience with any speaking browsers, but obviously
the nature of the medium means they don't have the concept of tooltips.

Nor can tooltips appear in the medium of paper, but a user-agent
generating an HTML print-out could include titles as footnotes, say.  Or
printing from a graphical browser with images disabled can include the
alt text in place of images -- but again, once on paper they are
included as part of the document, not floating above it interactively.

> As that reads to me - user-agents which don't support @alt or @title?
> Am I picking you up wrongly?

I see no reason why a user-agent in a medium which doesn't support
tooltips (or which for whatever reason has decided that tooltips are not
an appropriate part of its interface) can't provide users with alt and
title information in other ways.

> Tooltips are not about to go away (unless you wish to lobby browser
> manufacturers to no longer render these @'s as tooltips), and many
> authors still wrongly think of them as the 'tooltip thing'.

Sure.  But I don't thing creating a new 'tooltip' attribute would really
help with anything.

Smylers

Received on Monday, 30 July 2007 15:07:36 UTC