[whatwg] Question: rel="help"

Tantek Çelik tantek at cs.stanford.edu
Thu Sep 29 10:50:30 PDT 2011


Schalk,

Javascript-only help text (tooltip or otherwise) or any other content intended for human consumption is a really bad idea for all the usual reasons (#a11y, mobile, search etc.)

Consider adjusting your content design to incorporate the help text instead (perhaps with either the respective element's "title" attribute or with a nearby/adjacent element) so that it is available without JS, and then if you wish to do fancy tooltip effects feel free to provide them with JS (progressive enhancement) which re-uses that content from the page.

Thanks,

Tantek

-----Original Message-----
From: Schalk Neethling <sneethling at mozilla.com>
Sender: whatwg-bounces at lists.whatwg.org
Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2011 19:34:40 
To: Anne van Kesteren<annevk at opera.com>
Reply-To: sneethling at mozilla.com
Cc: <whatwg at lists.whatwg.org>
Subject: Re: [whatwg] Question: rel="help"

Hi Anna,

I heard some mention of using the data-* attributes so, something like:
<a href="" data-tooltip="Some help text"></a>

or

<input type="text" data-tooltip="Some help text" />

Would you agree that this is the better option?

On 29/09/2011 16:50, Anne van Kesteren wrote:
> On Thu, 29 Sep 2011 16:35:33 +0200, Schalk Neethling
> <sneethling at mozilla.com> wrote:
>> Question, would an element with rel="help" and a title="Help text"
>> make sense and be valid as a JavaScript hook for tooltips?
>>
>> Does not match the usage as described by the WHAT-WG
>> (http://developers.whatwg.org/links.html#link-type-help) exactly, but
>> close enough?
>
> If there is no actual hyperlink, using a link relation does not make sense.
>
>

-- 
Kind Regards,
Schalk Neethling
Mozilla Corporation


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