Comments on: Fun with Tooltips

By: Neil Rashbrook

Neil Rashbrook — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 11:32:04 +0000

I’m sorry, I didn’t realise that Firefox explicitly deletes newlines and replaces tabs with spaces before displaying the tooltip, but if you want to see what the effect would have looked like, you could try using a SeaMonkey nightly

By: dVyper

dVyper — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 11:14:03 +0000

FF being beaten by the lowly IE?!?! Tis an insignificant area but still :O

By: Fabian

Fabian — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 07:08:07 +0000

Don’t blame him for writing a test case!

@rdoherty: why don’t you add this as a test case to the bug? You can also post this into the WHAT WGs working group, so they have a test case for the title attribute.

By: rdoherty

rdoherty — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 05:27:40 +0000

@Fabian: thanks for the links! Interesting reads.

@Simon: yeah, I never expected HTML to work at all, but I figured I would try anyway to see if tags were omitted or caused any issues.

@pd: Yeah, the whole reason I did this test is because I knew there would be differences between browsers and I wanted to find out. And the only way we’ll make progress with the Internet is if someone decides to jump ahead of everyone else and implement new features.

By: pd

pd — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 04:51:43 +0000

you had to do this test to realise this ? Try doing regular web development and you’ll realise that cross-browser compatibility is A JOKE! It’s extremely hard to get excited about any of the Firefox 3.5 CSS changes such as transforms and so on, for this very reason: incompatible across browsers!

*sigh*

By: Alexander Limi

Alexander Limi — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 00:54:19 +0000

Also, Firefox times out the tooltip after a certain number of seconds. Drives me nuts, and makes it hard to use the tooltip as a quick “preview”, which most forum software does.

By: Simon

Simon — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 00:04:21 +0000

Firefox used to truncate them, which was annoying. I think it was fixing in 3.0…

My expectation (regardless of official standards) is that is should correctly render all printable characters, handle embedded linebreaks, and provide sensible line-wrapping. Anything more – embedded HTML, tabs, fancy formatting – is probably stretching the purpose of a title attribute a bit too far.

By: Fabian

Fabian — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 22:37:52 +0000

HTML5 says the following:
“If the title attribute’s value contains U+000A LINE FEED (LF) characters, the content is split into multiple lines. Each U+000A LINE FEED (LF) character represents a line break.”
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#the-title-attribute

Bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=358452
Behavior in other Browsers: http://www.webdevout.net/browser-support-html#support-html401-attrscore (HTML 4.01)

Tabs and HTML is definitely forbidden in title.