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Re: Title attribute on span tags

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Mar 5, 2003 11:52AM

On Wed, 5 Mar 2003, Rachel wrote:

> I was planning on using title attribute to show
> definitions of words in a tooltip, on mouseover.

That's a good idea, if the definitions are not needed.

Paradoxical? Well, my point is that you should never rely on having any
essential information presented via the use of title attributes.
As extra kudos, they're fine. Note that the vast majority of all
users will not even be aware of the presence of the title attributes,
since widely used browsers do not indicate their presence - at least not
for span elements.

Thus, anything that needs to be explained needs to be explained in the
textual content or via an explicit link. Normally the explanation should
precede first use, for reasons that are obvious to people on this list but
not otherwise. But in some cases the explanation could be given right
after first use, or at the end of the document, provided that there's a
statement and link referring to the glossary near the beginning.

Note that when a separate glossary or links to external resources
(containing explanations) is used, the first occurrence of a term could be
a link like

<a href="#foo" title="Foo is a generic term for anything">foo</a>

which gives the explanation (perhaps abridged) via a title attribute, yet
lets everyone access the explanation irrespectively of support to and
notice of title attributes.

I have some further notes on explaining terms, largely as a rant against
relying on abbr or acronym markup, at... wait... I can't use any of my
graphic browsers! Something wrong in my system or at my ISP. Luckily, I
can use Lynx on a Unix system I'm logged into, so that I can check the
address. Really. Just anecdotal but true evidence of how accessibility can
become important for unexpected reasons. The address is
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/abbr.html

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/


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