- From: David Poehlman <poehlman1@comcast.net>
- Date: Sun, 29 Jul 2007 15:43:42 -0400
- To: "Gregory J. Rosmaita" <oedipus@hicom.net>, "Lachlan Hunt" <lachlan.hunt@lachy.id.au>
- Cc: <public-html@w3.org>, <w3c-wai-ua@w3.org>
Tooltips as they are implemented using title and alt is a bug. alt and title are addative for many and necessary for others. The way they should work is by user choice either through suppression of the content they represent or via user agent configuration to meet other needs. In other words, by default, it should never be possible to see title or alt or perhaps only alt unless certain conditions are met. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Gregory J. Rosmaita" <oedipus@hicom.net> To: "Lachlan Hunt" <lachlan.hunt@lachy.id.au> Cc: <public-html@w3.org>; <w3c-wai-ua@w3.org> Sent: Sunday, July 29, 2007 9:52 AM Subject: ToolTips: bug or feature? lachlan wrote, quote: > The alt attribute is only rendered as a tooltip in IE, and > that's considered a bug for a variety of reasons. See this article. > > http://hixie.ch/advocacy/alt-tooltips unquote i find hixie's arguments, decidedly unconvincing. there ARE valid reasons why @alt and @title should be exposed to the user onMouseOver -- as i indicated, what you perceive as a logical icon may not be understood by a sighted visitor from a vastly different culture, so a tooltip exposition of ALT text is actually beneficial to users of all stripes. in the end, all hixie really addressed is author complaints, which have far more to do with user agent implementations than anything defective in the markup. if authors are so worried about ToolTips "cluttering" their pages, then they should be able to set their user agent to display ALT as tooltips, display TITLE as tooltips, display ALT and TITLE as tooltips, display no tooltips -- this is a user agent issues, better addressed by the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines Working Group: http://www.w3.org/WAI/UA than the HTML working group. gregory. ----------------------------------------------------------------- ABSURDITY, n. A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion. -- Ambrose Bierce, The Devils' Dictionary ----------------------------------------------------------------- Gregory J. Rosmaita, oedipus@hicom.net AND unagi69@concentric.net Camera Obscura: http://www.hicom.net/~oedipus/index.html UBATS: United Blind Advocates for Talking Signs: http://ubats.org -----------------------------------------------------------------
Received on Sunday, 29 July 2007 19:43:58 UTC