[whatwg] alt and title attribute exception

[Philip Jägenstedt]

On Wed, 01 Aug 2012 14:56:23 +0200, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen at iki.fi> wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 12:18 PM, Philip Jägenstedt <philipj at opera.com>  
> wrote:
>> When this was last discussed in the HTML WG (January 2012) I opened a  
>> bug
>> (MOBILE-275) for Opera Mobile to expose the title attribute in our
>> long-click menu, arguing that one could not enjoy XKCD without it. I  
>> meant
>> to report back to the HTML WG but forgot, so here it is. Unfortunately,  
>> the
>> bug was rejected... quoting the project management:
>>
>> "Sure it is nice to have, but noone else has it so we will not put our
>> effort into this"
>
> Firefox for Android (at least on the Nightly channel) displays the
> content of the title attribute on XKCD comics (up to a length limit
> which can often be too limiting) upon tap and hold:
> http://hsivonen.iki.fi/screen/xkcd-firefox-for-android.png
>
> Not to suggest that XKCD's title usage is OK but just to correct the
> "noone else" bit.

Thanks for pointing this out, either we did poor research or this is a new  
feature. In any case, I'll forward this information to our internal bug.  
Opera's context menus are a bit smaller than that, so I don't think adding  
a few paragraphs of text at the top of them would work.

>> it seems unwise to recommend using the title attribute to convey  
>> important information.
>
> Indeed. In addition to image considerations, I think
> http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#footnotes is bad
> advice.

Yeah, that looks like a pretty bad idea, even for sighted users on desktop  
browsers, unless you also add span[title] { border-bottom: 1px dotted  
black; } or similar to your CSS to make it more discoverable. Removing  
that advice seems like a good idea.

-- 
Philip Jägenstedt
Core Developer
Opera Software