[whatwg] The IMG element, proposing a CAPTION attribute

[Matthew Raymond]

Alexey Feldgendler wrote:
> On Wed, 15 Nov 2006 09:42:11 +0600, Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt at myrealbox.com> wrote:
> 
>>> I believe HTML should have an element for every attribute intended to
>>> hold human-readable text. A raw idea can go like this:
>>>
>>> <img id="img1" src="...">
>>> <label for="img1" type="title">...</label>
>>>
>>> Here, <label> holds a value which should be treated the same way like
>>> the title attribute on <img>, except that it can contain nested
>>> markup. This would be useful for all attributes defined as %Text in
>>> HTML -- in HTML4, these are ABBR, ALT, LABEL, STANDBY, SUMMARY, TITLE.
> 
>> You would need to stipulate that title= couldn't contain any <a>
>> elements. A link in a tooltip would usually be impossible to click. :-)
> 
> Maybe, or maybe not. I'd say "not recommended" because not all ways of rendering
> such "labels" allow clicking links and other interactive elements like inputs.

   I don't see the point of replacing attribute-based tooltips with
elements. Many platforms/OSes don't have tooltips that support anything
other than text. If you really want to replace text tooltips with
elements that support HTML content, you might as well go all the way and
allow people to use it as a means of creating popup content. Once you go
down that road, people will be asking for it anyways.

   As for using <label> for this, I don't think overloading <label> is
the best solution. The <label> element is fine for things like captions,
which are arguably the same thing as labels. Tooltips are not labels,
and the fact that a control can have a tooltip and a label would only
make this more confusing. What would you do with this?...

| <label for="img1" type="title">...</label>
| <input id="img1" [...]>