Re: Title as attribute or element?

Hello


The meaning or purpose of xlink:title is related to the hyperlink, 
the xlink:href provides, this is similar to xlink:role and xlink:arcrole.
If there is no such hyperlink, there is no relation and the 
attribute is meaningless. If Firefox does not ignore the attribute
for a circle, this is a bug.

title and desc elements provide a textual representation of
the parent element, useful as additional textual information 
and as a replacement, in case, where the user-agent hat no
capabilities for a graphical rendering at all
User-agents should make them accessible for the complete
document. With SVG1.1 it is allowed to use elements from
other namespaces inside to markup the meaning in more
details.SVGT1.2 has some new attributes to describe the
role of such an element.
Because title and desc are textual representations of the
related element, this is in general not well repesented as
a tooltip, because this forces authors to put wrong content
in such elements, which is not intented anymore as textual
representation, only as a (tool)tip. Therefore especially a 
part of the content of a desc can be a tip, but this is not the
complete functionality of a desc.

Now how to get a tooltip?
A simple method is to use declarative animation 
(not available currently in Geckos like Firefox due to
implementations gaps). This works already pretty nice
in SVG1.1, is stylable and it is possible to design the 
declarative animation in such a way, that the information
is always accessible, even if the viewer has an 
implementation gap, using for example a switch.
In SVGT1.2 one can use the new attributes role or those
from RDFa to indicate the functionality as a tooltip.
Because in SVGT1.2 the desc cannot contain further
subelements, unfortunately the part with the tooltip
cannot be indicated separately. Authors can for example
use text or textArea outside the desc instead with the related
attribute 'role' or 'property', using the attribute 'about' to 
indicate, for which element such a text is a tooltip. In doubt
this can be combined with interactive and declarative 
animation too.

Received on Friday, 5 December 2008 10:51:58 UTC