[whatwg] several messages about the HTML syntax

Jonas Sicking jonas at sicking.cc
Mon Mar 3 14:49:10 PST 2008


David Gerard wrote:
> On 03/03/2008, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
>> On Mon, 3 Mar 2008, Krzysztof Żelechowski wrote:
> 
>>  > When I want to define a paragraph-style tool-tip, I am left with the
>>  > following choice: either make the source code unreadable by making an
>>  > excessively long line (this is also true for URI attributes but they are
>>  > not expected to be readable) or make the tool-tip ugly by inserting line
>>  > breaks.  (It cannot be done in an portable way because the width of the
>>  > tool-tip window and the fount metrics at the viewer's UI are unknown).
> 
>> I recommend not making paragraph-long tooltips. That's terrible user
>>  interface.
> 
> 
> But how will we read the asides on xkcd.com ?!
> 
> (i.e.: If people can do something, they will, and this needs to be
> allowed for. ASCII art in tooltips hits my "wrong" button, but it's
> out there. OTOH I've never seen a tooltip in a monospaced font.
> User-agents treating all whitespace as spaces and reformatting as
> nicely as they can would be fine to me. I'm sure others will come up
> with real-life use cases for ridiculously long tooltips.)

The current spec doesn't forbid paragraph-style tooltips. It just 
doesn't pander to them. This seems like a very good tradeoff.

/ Jonas



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