83268 - [RFE] Tooltips should have some simple formatting (linebreaks etc.).

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 52759

(Core :: XUL, enhancement)

Description

[Roland]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:0.9+) Gecko/20010524
BuildID:    2001052404

As soon as Mozilla will have decent tooltip support (Bug 57599), wouldn't it be
nice to include also some kind of simple string formatting, to allow authors
display their text a little fancier than IE does it now. 
I'm thinking more about along the lines of allowing entering (and rendering) of
linebreaks and possibly tab characters in tooltip popup.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
Write a HTML with a DIV (or whatever) element, having TITLE argument containing
either "\n"(C-style escape code) or newline character(s).

Actual Results:  "\n" gets explicitly rendered in a string as any other
character sequence, if You explicitly enter newline - just a little box
(placeholder for newline) appears within the text

Expected Results:  It'd be nice if linebreaks (or equivalent escape characters)
would be rendered as normal linebreaks.

I fully understand that such a feature is not W3C and could be misused by many
malicious or irresponsibile web developers, but in many other cases this could
prove just that little nifty feature that could win a hearts of many ("Why the
hell does IE mess up my carefully designed tooltips!!")

There are plenty of situations when designer might be interested in providing
little bit of extra (popup) information to the user, but by using tooltips,
(s)he is limited to only single line of text, whereas in some cases it would be
much more desirable to break this information into two or more separate lines...
Only way to do it now is DOM scripting.  While this is indeed much more
flexible, it is also lots of work and not always worth the time...

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Presenting information via tooltips only seems like a really really bad idea 
from an accessibility standpoint.

I suggest that this get wontfixed.  ccing hixie and mpt for their thoughts.

Comment 2

[Henri Sivonen (:hsivonen)]

This is a duplicate of bug 52759. I'm arking this bug as a duplicate. That bug was WONTFIXed. I agree with 
that resolution (but not with the reasoning--putting <br> tags in attributes is bogus).

While the title attribute may be displayed as a tooltip, it is not necessarily displayed as a tooltip. For example 
Opera and iCab display it in the status bar.

A newline appearing as a box is bug 63824. Doing automatic line breaking is bug 57599.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 52759 ***

Comment 3

[Chad Austin]

verified dups