[thelist] (Too) Long title tag in NS6

Andrew Chadwick andrew.chadwick at prnewswire.co.uk
Wed Oct 17 05:35:04 CDT 2001


On Wed, Oct 17, 2001 at 11:35:48AM +0200, Derek Brouwers wrote:
> I know it's not done to put a lot of text in <alt> or <title> tags, but
> *the client* insists on it.
> 
> The problem now is that IE rearranges the text nicely on a couple of
> lines, while NS6 (on both mac and pc) puts the whole text on 1 line, so
> that it is displayed way past the screen's border.
> (example on http://derek.sign.be/test_titletext.html)

I agree - Mozilla (and NS6) should do this. There's a bug report in
about this, so go and vote for it to be fixed:
<http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57599>

By the way, Gecko embedding engines such as those used in Galeon,
Kmeleon, nautilus-mozilla and friends seem to use native tooltips
rather than the buggy Mozilla ones. There are *other* issues
associated with that, though:
<http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=104379>

> How can I put line breaks in the text, or is there a better way instead
> of using <span title="..."> tag to get the (sorta) same effect?
> And while we're at it, any suggestions for NS4 where it doesn't work at
> all?

You can't put line break characters in the text; even "real" line
breaks do the wrong thing in some tooltip implementations. The best
way of managing it is to write the tooltip on one line - 

   <acronym title="World Wide Web Consortium">W3C</acronym>

and not

   <acronym title="World Wide
    Web Consortium">W3C</acronym>

The title attribute can be applied to a wide range of elements, so you
could associate your tooltip with a tag that has semantic meaning
instead.

To support the thousand other browsers properly, I'd suggest making
the interpretation of your site not dependent upon tooltips being
displayed. You might need to do a little expectation management for
your client here :)

-- 
Andrew Chadwick, UNIX/Internet Programmer, PR Newswire Europe, Oxford
--
The views or opinions above are solely mine and are not necessarily those
of PR Newswire Europe. The message may contain privileged or confidential
information; if you are not a named recipient, notify me, and do not copy,
use, or disclose this message. <andrew.chadwick at prnewswire.co.uk>.




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