[whatwg] Web Apps 1.0: On-line help

Ben Meadowcroft ben at benmeadowcroft.com
Mon May 9 14:53:43 PDT 2005


> On 5/8/05, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> > On Sun, 8 May 2005, Ben Meadowcroft wrote:
> > >
> > > There are two types of help that I think are appropriate for web 
> > > applications, full page help and element sensitive help.
> > 
> > The problem with both is discoverability. Unless we can solve that, 
> > there is not much point having anything in the spec.
> 
> For the context sensitive one we use CSS with a cursor:help  
> that's the way we usually implement it from a visible 
> perspective, I'm not sure if there's particular value in 
> defining an attribute to take the help contents though, 
> especially as this would mean it couldn't then have mark-up, 
> which most of the context help systems I've done do use.

Having mark-up would be useful. My intent was to provide a method of
showing context sensitive help which allowed for a bit more information
than displaying the title as a tool tip does. Mark-up would go well with
that idea.

Discoverability would be left to the user agents. This kind of help is
fairly well established in windows, just look at the internet options
dialog of Internet Explorer for an example.
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