Re: Whether to display inner or outermost <title>?

Hi, David-

David Woolley wrote (on 8/4/08 3:19 AM):
> 
> Doug Schepers wrote:
>>
>> Indeed I did read it, and I think that your algorithm is simple and 
>> effective.  I plan to use it in some proposed wording on the topic.  
>> I'm sorry I didn't respond before... but it's definitely on my list of 
>> todos.
> 
> First thought: is this really any different from inline containment.

Sorry, can you explain further?


>> I also want to define the content model.
>>
>> Here's a question for the community: should @display="none" on a 
>> <title> stop the UA from displaying a tooltip?  As a developer, I've 
>> often wanted to block Opera's behavior here, because it interfered 
>> with my own, nicer, home-rolled solution.
> 
> You are equating <title/> with tooltips. 

Not exactly.  I'm just using the looser term for the popup infobox (aka 
"hover box", “ScreenTip”, etc.).  That's what Opera does with the 
<title> contents, and that seems to be fairly effective, working on the 
same paradigm as the link @title.  In the underlying markup, there is a 
distinction between the roles played by the <title>, <desc>, and 
<tooltip> elements (note: <tooltip> is a planned element for SVG 1.2 
Full).  Since this is the way browsers seem to be trending, and because 
it is generally helpful, I think it's appropriate that we tighten up the 
spec to make it an interoperable feature.

We will take pains to leave room for display of the actual semantics 
that distinguish the 3 elements (and the xlink:title).


>  Even if one has custom tooltips (which might be reasonable
> for graphic art, but possibly not for technical drawings) 

That depends on what you want to display.  An author may want the 
infobox to be something other than the element's title, something that 
supplies related information, for example.


> one should not be suppressing aural 
> presentation, and I would argue that one doesn't really benefit the user 
> by suppressing a status line display of the title.

Good points.  I will note that the status line and (more importantly) 
the aural presentation must not be affected by any @display values.


> For Jonathon's application, I would argue that consistent presentation 
> of titles is important, although it is possible that Jonathon sees that 
> consistency being imposed by his web application, rather than the basic 
> browser.

As you correctly brought up before, consistency is important in the 
identification of links, but authors also wish to override that default 
behavior.  This is no different, and we should give authors the power to 
adapt the default behaviors to their needs.  In most cases, authors will 
probably go with the default, so there will be enough consistency to 
establish the idiom.

In any case, for SVG+CSS UAs, the CSS display property would override 
the display attribute (though not the inline display property), so user 
stylesheets could be used to define the behavior, too.

Jonathan should be free to use the native capabilities provided by 
browsers.  Making sure that the behavior is defined enough is important 
to make sure that we have interoperability for his use case.

Regards-
-Doug Schepers
W3C Team Contact, WebApps, SVG, and CDF

Received on Monday, 4 August 2008 08:54:57 UTC