[whatwg] Meaning of the title= attribute

Thu Feb 14 17:56:33 PST 2008

On Wed, 29 Nov 2006, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> On Nov 27, 2006, at 2:26 PM, Matthew Raymond wrote:
> > 
> > Alexey Feldgendler wrote:
> > ...
> > > In your opinion, if %Text attributes ("title", "alt") in HTML allowed
> > > nested markup somehow, wouldn't the "title" attribute sufficient for
> > > fulfilling the use case of captions?
> > 
> >    No, because a caption is not necessarily "advisory information"[1],
> > which is what the |title| attribute is defined as containing.
> > ...
> 
> As in, <html title="PG-13">? Eh, that's not really what title= is for. title=
> is for "please use this for tooltips so alt= isn't ruined". :-)
> 
> A useful medium-independent description of title= might be "Supplemental 
> text that is relevant only when concentrating on the element to which it 
> applies".

It's not clear to me that this is especially better than what it says now. 
In fact, it might be worse (what's supplemental about an image credit?).

I've left the text as is for now. Please do detail any concerns you have 
with the current text, though.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'