Re: Title as attribute or element?

Olaf,

No doubt you've understood some of my concern,
it may be the WG decided to leave this issue to the UA developers,  
but no doubt authors would like some coherence in behaviour and  
guidance on use.

consider for instance
should the tooltip onmouseover display the document title when  
hovering over the document, where no other title for the region is  
present? this could be irritating, so maybe not? but for the children:
what is a tooltip to display, in the case for instance where we have  
a bowl of "fruit" such as "apples" , "pears" and "strawberries".
is it likely that "fruit" could ever be displayed?
yes, if carefully designed, and

bearing in mind there is a rather significant difference between  
navigating with a mouse or keyboard. for instance afaik there is not  
currently a single UA that displays a tooltip when navigating with a  
keyboard. I have filed enhancement bug reports.
Perhaps more fundamentally in SVG1.1 it is trivial to add titles to  
elements, and these will be displayed as tooltips onmouseover.
However it is less clear how the keyboard navigator will benefit from  
these titles.
eg they could be a handicap if they require to be navigated through.
in html a number of workarounds such as skip links are being tried.

also
Jeff has for instance pointed out that title may be used to describe  
both the linked resource and the purpose of the link. But this is  
extremely confusing for both authors and users. html: alt and title  
already demonstrate this confusion well.

It seems evident to me that we need examples of good practice,  
possible including a test suite to demonstrate these examples and  
others.
perhaps you could contribute some suitable examples?

regards

Jonathan Chetwynd
Accessibility Consultant on Media Literacy and the Internet

**a, animate, animateColor, animateMotion, animateTransform,  
animation, audio, discard, font-face-uri, foreignObject, handler,  
image, mpath, prefetch, script, set, use, video



On 6 Jan 2008, at 12:34, Dr. Olaf Hoffmann wrote:


The title attribute from the language XLink
(see: http://www.w3.org/TR/xlink/ ) is intended for
hyperlinks. Even if it is reused in other languages
like SVG, it is still only useful for elements referencing
other documents/content somehow.

And indeed, if we look for example in the related table
of the SVG tiny 1.2 LC we only find such elements:
http://www.w3.org/TR/SVGMobile12/ 
attributeTable.html#attribute_xlink__title

For other elements like svg it is not mentioned and has therefore
no meaning or not the meaning you are looking for.
Therefore the title attribute from XLink is not useful for the  
applications
you are looking for and is not used in SVG for such a purpose too.

As already mentioned in the specifications, authors should only use
exactly one title element (and I think it is useful too to provide  
exactly
one desc element) as a direct children of the svg element. To simplify
the situation for user agent the position of the title (and desc) of the
svg element is on top in the source code, before other children of the
svg element.

Another title and desc elements inside a children of the svg element are
intended for this element and its children and not for the parent
svg element itself. If user agents chooses for example a title of a
g element somewhere inside the svg as a title of the complete
document, I think, this is simply an error and should be replaced
by something useful in the next version of this user agent ;o)

Oh - and I use title and desc in almost any document and often
for other elements than the svg element - therefore only my files
are already maybe above 2000 freely available samples for
SVG documents with a title element; documents in the test suite
contain titles too, therefore you cannot say, that they are not
used, only the implementations/interpretation of such elements are
bad in several user agents or they to not provide a structured
alternative text view of an SVG document using such information,
but indeed such documents exit.
And I strongly recommend authors to use them and to
insist, that there preferred user agents provide a useful access
to all title and desc elements in an SVG document, because without
most of such documents do not really have a meaning at all, they
are only decorative (what is not bad, but for many images not enough).

About a good choice of a title for test samples: This is maybe a matter
of taste. It is important to identify the test sample itself and  
there is
already a lot of description available outside the document within the
test suite, therefore this is a slightly different approach as for a
standalone document used for a different purpose.
In my own text suite however I use title and desc more related to
the approach you have in mind and having additionally similar
information available outside the test files to ensure a good
accessibility to the test itself. This is some more time consuming
work, but I think, it is useful for the structure and understanding
of my own test suite.

Received on Sunday, 6 January 2008 19:59:50 UTC