Re: disparity in quicktips and guidelines?

At 05:46 PM 7/9/99 -0500, Wendy A Chisholm wrote:
>although the alternative text for client-side image maps links is not shown
>in IE and Netscape - they are available if you tab to them.  Thus, as well
>as being available in Lynx, HPR, etc., we decided it was not a problem.  As
>Jim states, however, it is an issue for server-side image maps.
>
[...]>
>One bit of confusion is that  in IE the alt-text of the image map image is
>displayed as the tooltip.

This is in the area of layering and bubbling and resolving contention for
what entity responds to a given input.  

The IE behavior Wendy describes is not consistent with the bubble-up rules
for event trapping in HTML 4.0, if I understand her right.  For consistent
feel of the UI, the tooltip daemon should fish in the same bubble-up waters
as a script assigned to handle the onMouseOver event by the author.  When
the mouse is over a sensitive region, the information for that sensitive
region should take precedence over the information for the whole map for
ToolTip display.  [As Wendy implied.]

We [Wendy? Ian? -- Jon is on vacation] should check this with Microsoft for
any other explanation, but I suspect that they would agree that what IE
does now in this particular instance breaks the pattern and is not the best
way for it to behave. 

This is an important technique under "UI should be consistent".  There is a
class of behaviors that includes at least ToolTips, the browser re-styling
of link content in reponse to onMouseOver, and author scripts that revise
the display under those conditions.  There should be some consistency to
these behaviors, and the behaviors that should be consistent include both
behaviors put there by the static code of the browser and the
document-specific code provided by the author.  In particular the  blending
rules should help give the user interface a consistent feel across the
behavior contributions from different sources.

Al

Received on Saturday, 10 July 1999 10:24:14 UTC