- From: Robert Burns <rob@robburns.com>
- Date: Mon, 30 Jul 2007 13:08:07 -0500
- To: HTML WG <public-html@w3.org>
On Jul 30, 2007, at 2:01 AM, Smylers wrote: > > Joshue O Connor writes: > >> 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". > > No it wouldn't. Because your definitions of title and alt there > describe their contents; your definition for tooltip descibes how its > contents will be displayed, but says nothing about what the content > is. > As such, it's quite possible for content to be in multiple categories, > which obviously doesn't remove amiguity. > > And having something as presentational as tooltip output being > specified > in HTML creates problems for all those user-agents which can't include > tooltips. I think the term "tooltip" has two different meanings. One is semantic — as a tip for using a tool. The other is presentational — as a foreground view displayed on hover (hover view). The presentational tooltip has problems with non-visual browsers, but the semantic tooltip does not. I'm not sure about adding a specific tooltip attribute, but it might be useful especially on UI control related elements. Especially if CSS adds further support for presenting HTML semantics as a foreground view displayed on hover (and UAs adopt that CSS as a mechanism to display @title, e.g., through their default style sheets), it would give authors the ability to control how @tooltip is displayed (along with @title and @alt). Having said that, I think it would be a good idea for us to specify that UAs should provide additional ways to display and handle various semantics (often those buried in the source). For example, a document fragment could have both @href and @cite set on it and therefore require a secondary mechanism to get at @cite. Similarly, an element might have @alt, @title and @tooltip set and there should be a way for users to get at these attributes without viewing the source or even requiring users to view the DOM view. In this way UAs would also be freeing the presentational tooltip for authors use (because there would be another mechanism like a contextual menu to get at attributes and fallback). Take care, Rob
Received on Monday, 30 July 2007 18:08:20 UTC