Re: zoom tool-tips

If a college environment has a multi-user  system that does not allow for
per-user configurations then they are about 30 years behind the technology
curve and should get something that does.

All that aside,

I don't think that authors should be able to set the absolute size of tool
tips, only the relative size (compared to the user's default).

In HTML there is no real way of doing this - people have used pop-up windows,
or relied on the bahaviour of different browsers (but since they are
different it is an inherently unreliable approach).

In SVG, by contrast, it is fairly simple:

    <text class="tooltip" x="0" y="0" visibility="hidden">
      ToolTip!
      <set attributeName="visibility" attributeType="CSS" to="visible"
           begin="focusin" end="focusout" />
    </text>

(the class="tooltip" is just so that if you have a lot of these on a page you
can style them collectively).

You might be right that the approach should be via user agents, to connect to
a standardised tooltip mechanism, since these things exist in several window
systems (and a couple of commmercial operating systems that only have one
choice of window system). That would be a topic to take up on the wai-xtech
list.

cheers

Chaals


On Mon, 1 Apr 2002, jonathan chetwynd wrote:

  There are good reasons for allowing authors to specify the font-size of
  tooltips*.

  I'm not convinced this is solely a user agent issue.
  the solution you've given, which I didn't know of so thanks, is as you
  say operating level.

  there may be a need for a ua level control, as well as html level
  control, and os level(cascading similarly to css?).

  Unless the  user is aware  of these controls,  they will not be able to
  take advantage of them.

  *working in a college environment, where many users have access to each
  and every machine, and there is an expectation that upto 30 unique users
  will use any one machine, it is not realistic to configure each machine
  for every user. their logins do not give them access to a unique user space.
  I hope this further explains the need for a variey of means to configure
  such things....

  thanks


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Received on Monday, 1 April 2002 19:22:28 UTC