- From: Charles McCathieNevile <chaals@opera.com>
- Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2007 10:30:07 +0200
- To: "Jon Barnett" <jonbarnett@gmail.com>, "Gregory J. Rosmaita" <oedipus@hicom.net>
- Cc: "Maciej Stachowiak" <mjs@apple.com>, "Lachlan Hunt" <lachlan.hunt@lachy.id.au>, public-html@w3.org, w3c-wai-ua@w3.org
On Tue, 31 Jul 2007 03:38:24 +0200, Jon Barnett <jonbarnett@gmail.com> wrote: > On 7/30/07, Gregory J. Rosmaita <oedipus@hicom.net> wrote: >> >> aloha, chaaals! >> >> let me reiterate my original proposition, which is archived at: >> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007Jul/1135.html > > If I'm understanding correctly, your main point in this discussion is > that MSIE should be free to present @alt as a tooltip if it chooses. > You've iterated this point a few times now. Along with Gregory, I believe that MSIE should be able to do so. I think we should recommend that it does not, without forbidding it. Let's go through Ian's (actually it seems the strongest are dbaron's) points... 1. The spec doesn't say that it should. Irrelevant. We are rewriting the spec, so it can say whatever is the best thing to do. 3. Most major browsers don't do it. (In fact only WinIE does.) This means that most desktop browsers in use today *do* do it. I happen to think that isn't a good enough reason to keep doing it, but I think this point is self-defeating. The rest of the reasons given make a very limited assumption - that there is one way to present a tool tip and no way to distinguish different types of tooltip, and are valid within that limited scope. Given that... 2. Doing so encourages authors to treat the "alt" attribute as a tooltip attribute, instead of an image replacement attribute, which hurts accessibility. 8. Some companies have been discouraged from using "alt" attributes on their images because they don't want them to appear as tooltips. These are essentially the same problem, and only arise where the default is to make the two indistinguishable. They are however very sound arguments. 4. Doing so causes the title attribute in constructs such as the following to be overriden: <p> <a href="http://validator.w3.org/check/referer" title="Validate this page using the W3C Validator"> <img src="icons/valid-xhtml10" alt="Valid XHTML 1.0!"> </a> </p> This relies on the specifically limited scope. It is not rocket science to provide a tooltip that has various pieces of information in it. But this is the strongest argument of the lot. 5. Users that need this feature can get it using extensions. Huh? Why not put it into the browser? Recently, Google managed to use Firefox' extension mechanism to expose a huge security hole for MITM attacks - something that doesn't happen in the same way with inbuilt functionality. And Google try to do the right thing. Relying on extensions increases the amount you ask users to trust others on the web, yet we still have no really good mechanism for normal users to understand whether they should do so. Secunia advisories (and the like) are not something that my Mum (quite a tech-savvy user, who introduced the Web to thousands of Australian schools) even understands... 6. Authors who need this feature should use the title attribute. This is a mistake actually. Tooltips only appear in limited contexts - not necessarily on mobile browsers, people turn them off, etc. For better or for worse, authors cannot rely on tooltips appearing except by going to the same sort of lengths people currently do for fly-out / dropdown menus - i.e. build a fallback for them. 7. Extremely few pages are adversely affected by not doing this. In accessibility, this argument carries very little weight. For a group who are used to being unable to do everyday things like shopping or paying taxes in the way one expects, you measure and treasure the successes rather than accepting that just because a lot of things fail, you might as well assume everything will and not worry about supporting a solution that has limited scope. (This is not to say that you should not look for a better way, but that killing off the relatively small handful of things that work now, in exchange for some hope for the future, a priori gives poor outcomes...) > Instead, I suggest precisely the opposite. HTML 5 should explicitly > forbid @alt from being displayed as a tooltip*. Also, @alt SHOULD not > be presented to the user in any way by default when an image is being > displayed - in the same manner that a UA doesn't display the contents > of <object> if the media is being displayed. Any other behavior > encourages misuse of alternate content by encouraging authors to use > @alt as supplemental, not alternate, content. I agree that we should say 'user agents SHOULD NOT present alt and title in a way that makes it impossible to distinguish them'. Anything more is, I think, overly restrictive (and we would ignore it in practice). Anything less is avoiding the problem. > * There is one exception to this... Actually there are several. But one is enough to make me think we should clarify the reasoning, make the recommendation, and be done. (While we are at it we could remove the statement that title can be a description, or edit it to make sense, but that is already another thread). cheers Chaals -- Charles McCathieNevile, Opera Software: Standards Group hablo español - je parle français - jeg lærer norsk chaals@opera.com Catch up: Speed Dial http://opera.com
Received on Tuesday, 31 July 2007 08:31:25 UTC