Re: [css4-ui] ::tooltip

On Apr 12, 2012, at 2:18 PM, Divya Manian <manian@adobe.com> wrote:

> On 4/11/12 9:21 PM, "Andrew Fedoniouk" <news@terrainformatica.com> wrote:
> 
>> Ideally we should have one mechanism that covers all use cases, not two
>> of them.
>> 
>> This for example:
>> 
>>   div[title] -> :tooltip { background:gold; font-size: x-large;  }
>> 
>> does exactly as yours:
>> 
>>  div[title]::tooltip { background:gold; font-size: x-large;  }
> 
> No it does not. You are asking for completely different set of features
> from what Lea did. All Lea suggests we have is a way to style the tooltips
> that browsers show on <abbr> or image elements. You are suggesting we add
> a state to an existing element that somehow becomes a tooltip by some
> magic (how?)

Pseudo-classes are not just state based. For instance, ':nth-child' selects an object that wasn't otherwise selectable, and I think that is why there is some confusion. But it is still selecting an actual document element, and a tooltip is not an element (the title attribute is a node, but CSS deals with those differently). So I agree that a pseudo-class is not appropriate for selecting and styling a tool tip. 

For some pseudo-elements, you can grab content from elsewhere. We have 'content' and 'flow-from' (regions) that could provide that content for '::tooltip'. 'Content' could grab it from the 'title' attribute, like this:

div::tooltip { content: attr(title); background: gold; font-size: x-large;  }

In this case, if no title attribute exists, then there is no content. If there is no content, then the pseudo-element does not appear (just as with '::before' and '::after'). So we don't actually need '[title]' in the selector. 

Or we we could implicitly by default grab whatever the UA puts into tooltips (typically the 'title' attribute content), the way ::first-line provides its own content. But pulling in content from other sources too would be a powerful and useful feature. With region's 'flow-from', the tooltip could be more than just a string of text. 

> These are not use cases for the same "feature" and need to be talked about
> separately.

Received on Friday, 13 April 2012 13:33:08 UTC