RE: Re: Clarification needed on ALT/TITLE tooltips

> From: Ian Hickson [mailto:ian@hixie.ch]
>
> I have yet to see an important page 
> where the
> lack of tooltips is such a problem; all the pages that rely 
> on them for
> navigation are unusable anyway, since users won't know to look for
> tooltips in the first place.

I don't want to get into the alttext holy war here as there has been on Bugzilla, but this opinion is wrought with personal subjectivity. The pages important to you are not the same as those important to others; I have seen many pages that many deem "important" that use alt text as part of their navigation system, and the users all know to hold the mouse over the links to read them. I don't think that design is "good." But I do know that it exists and have seen it.


> A friend of mine is writing HTML for a meteorologist company, . . . and he refused to
> . . .He's not a web developer, he's a meteoroligst student

I agree this is a very normal case. To write a standard that is complex (as all modern W3C standards certainly are) then demand that every author of HTML grasp all of its complexity before writing a character of HTML is a bit snobbish. In the Web's beginnings, the above meteorologist may have been on his way to becoming a serious Web Developer without realizing it. What then?

If evangelism is part of the mission of the W3C (the recent comments in this thread have begged such a mission), perhaps simplified documents ought to be published with each standard, distilling, for example, XHTML 1.0 + CSS3 down to the most basic pieces a beginning developer ought to know, and so, explicitly state what a crappy "How to write webpages" book or crappy WYSIWYG editor is missing the boat on when we say one or the other is a problem.

Or, it can be left to the existing evangelism groups - WaSP, part of the Mozilla project, etc.


-Chris "SoopahMan" Moschini
http://hiveminds.info/
http://soopahman.com/

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