Re: shr - span elements with title attribute, tooltip?

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Tue, 29 Mar 2011 19:52:17 +0200 Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> wrote: 

LMI> Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> writes:
AS> With shr, does span elements with title attributes get a tooltip (the
AS> small pop-up text that appears if you hold the mouse over the element
AS> for a while) with the text of the attribute?
>> 
AS> Shouldn't they?

LMI> The patch looks good, but all elements can have titles, can't they?  So
LMI> if shr is going to support titles, it should probably be done in the
LMI> general tag handling thing.  (And, of course, <td> handling needs
LMI> special-casing.)

I hope you can look at that.  I don't know shr.el well at all.

>> What if two such titled span elements are nested?

LMI> shr aims to be fast, not a complete HTML renderer.  So if that's
LMI> difficult, it's not essential.

It's not difficult.  Just render "[title: content]" instead of "content"
when the user asks to toggle the title, and give the user a way to do it
locally or globally for the whole buffer.

>> Also the mouse is required for tooltips and that's annoying when there's
>> no mouse.  Maybe it can be an `shr-show-titles' toggling command on an
>> article, like `t' toggles the headers?  I think we already have
>> something like that for toggling images in the shr renderer, right?

LMI> Hm...  isn't there a general Emacs tool tip thing that can show the tool
LMI> tip without using the mouse?  I have no idea, but there probably should
LMI> be if there isn't.  :-)

I don't think so.  And here's my argument against going down that road...

Tool tips are (arguably) one of the worst UI elements you can use
generally, as they are only intended for controls that don't have space
for labels (e.g. toolbars).  They require fine control, *a mouse*, and
the user to be patient while hovering above something.  There is not
even a hint that hovering will reveal a tool tip, you just have to hope.

See Raskin's "The Humane Interface" and Cooper's "About Face" for more
on this topic; Raskin is particularly consistent on the universal use of
text.  So I hope we use tool tips sparingly and only in addition to a
simple, inline way of showing titles.

Ted