[whatwg] several messages about the HTML syntax

[David Gerard]

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.)


- d.