Re: SVG2 tooltip, title

Doug Schepers:
>
> We will likely define the behavior of the 'title' attribute, since
> browsers already support that "tooltip" behavior in SVG, carried over
> from HTML.
>
> Authors are already familiar with this from HTML, so we should bring
> this into SVG. We need to reuse patterns where we find them.
>

This means, the simplest solution would be to add a title attribute
to all elements to align with the suboptimal naming of (X)HTML 
and to benefit from the situation, that (X)HTML authors already
use title attributes to provide tooltip information.
Because the element syntax is quite different from attribute syntax,
such (X)HTML authors will likely not mix up element and attribute
functionality.

Once such an attribute is available, one can follow the clarification
approach of SVG tiny 1.2 to suggest authors not to use the title element
but the title attribute to provide tooltips and to keep the title element
for the text alternative.

Obviously, if a tooltip information is available, this can be helpful
for text alternatives, if this alternative provides the decribed
functionality as well, therefore it is of course ok to provide this
information about a tooltip in the text alternative.
With a distinctive markup there will be no problem, that this
is meant as a tooltip, therefore the distinction by markup helps
to improve the understandability of the text alternative, because
the difference becomes machine readable as with RDFa or roles.


Olaf

Received on Friday, 11 January 2013 11:28:59 UTC