Re: [css-ui] text-overflow: ellipsis and user agent tooltips

> On 02 Apr 2013, at 02:59, Philip Walton <philip@philipwalton.com> wrote:
> 
> I noticed today that Safari 6 and Webkit Nightly (but not Chrome) show a native browser tooltip when a user hovers over any text that has been truncated via the `text-overflow: ellipsis` declaration. The tooltip that appears is the same as the tooltip that appears for elements with a `title` attribute.
> 
> I looked at the current draft of the spec [1] and didn't see any mention of what user agents should or should not do in this situation.
> 
> I don't know if this has been discussed here before, but perhaps it's worth being explicit about the desired behavior. Currently, if you display your own JavaScript tooltip in these cases, your Safari viewers will see two tooltips.
> 
> [1] http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-ui/#text-overflow <http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-ui/#text-overflow>
After discussing it on the weekly telecon, the working group has agreed that the concern is valid, but has decided not to address it at level 3 of css-ui.

Requiring User Agents not to show a tooltip is not something we want to do, as tooltips are useful and may be expected by users of this UA. On the other hand, requiring that UAs to show a tooltip does not sound advisable unless there is a mechanism for authors to control or disable it if they want to provide an alternative. Defining such a mechanism is out of scope for css-ui level 3, and until such a mechanism is available, we have decided to leave this behavior undefined and up to the User Agent.

Philip, the WG would appreciate if you could let us know if you are ok with this conclusion

 - Florian