167435 - Improve Tooltip display of long TITLE attribute values

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 248488

(Camino Graveyard :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Derek Schrock]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20020908
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20020908

title attribute of a link (<a...) element should place returns every n
characters for long title strings

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Goto at the testcase
2. Mouseover the "Mouserover me" link
Actual Results:  
The title attribute for the link element displays across the screen

Expected Results:  
Place a return every n characters

Look at the testcase in IE for a better handling of the title attribute

Comment 1

[Derek Schrock]

Attachment: testcase

Mouseover the "Mouseover me" link

Comment 2

[Greg K.]

Confirmed using FizzillaCFM/2002090608 on 10.1.5. The tooltip doesn't wrap until
it horizontally fills the window.

What I'd suggest is to, once tooltip width reaches a certain width (screen, or
perhaps a percentage of screen) and wrapping becomes necessary, wrap in the
middle of the text at the nearest whitespace, rather than at the whitespace
nearest the end.

(Note that neither IE nor Mozilla display the entire TITLE text. I'm not sure I
agree with arbitrary truncation of these.)

Comment 3

[Derek Schrock]

er yeah that's what I wanted to say... wrap

Since this is a Mozilla problem as well should Product be changed? Chimera -> Mozilla?

Comment 4

[Greg K.]

No, since Mozilla and Chimera have completely different code to show tooltips
they probably need separate bugs.

Comment 5

[Mike Brittain]

In response to the note in Comment #2, IE 6.0 does seem to display the entire
text of the title attribute.  I've got a testcase that I'll post with an even
longer title attribute.  IE seems to run into trouble if the text is too long
and the "tool-tip" bumps up against the top or bottom of the screen.

It might be handy for test in the title to wrap, but there should likely be a
limit to how much text should be displayed in the tool-tip.  Since there is only
a time of about six seconds to read the tool-tip without re-activating it, it
doesn't seem likely that a long passage could be read with much ease (unless the
time was extended proportionately with the length of the title attribute text).

I don't know that I have a definite opinion on how much text should be displayed
in a tool-tip, but I would assume that it would have to eventually be truncated
before it got out of hand.  Web developers should avoid writing a book inside
the title attribute.  I guess that is the assumption that was made when the
tool-tips were first designed to be truncated.  

The number of complaints/reports of truncated tool-tips is inversely
proportional to the length of the title attribute capable of being displayed. 
It seems like you can get away with approximately 85 characters before
truncated.  Maybe this should be extended to 250 or so, allow line-wrapping, and
call it a day?


[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/global.html#adef-title

Comment 6

[Mike Brittain]

Attachment: Testcase

This is an even longer title than is available in the previous testcase.  It
can be used to show that IE 6 can choke itself by trying to display ALL of the
title attribute.  I'll provide a screen shot on request.

Comment 7

[u48850]

I ran into this problem by accident when my beloved Mozilla truncated my 128
character long title attribute. Is there a specification that limits its length?
If there is not, then Opera's solution is better as it displays the whole text
and displays it as long as the mouse is over the object.

Comment 8

[Peter Hewitt]

I don't understand why this bug still hasn't been fixed. The point at which it
stops off is very short. Why can't it wrap like IE does?

I'm currently having this problem in 
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5a) Gecko/20030714 Mozilla
Firebird/0.6
which is nearly a year older than the build with the original bug.

Comment 9

[Mike Pinkerton (not reading bugmail)]

.

Comment 10

[Chris Casciano]

Peter & Csaba... this bug is filed against Camino (OS X Native) not Mozilla (XUL
Based)... these 2 browsers have very different behavior on this issue (I'm
seeing a few hundred words - 15 or 20 full screen wide lines - displayed in Camino)

Mozilla bugs on this problem should be focused towards bug 45375 (bug 67127 for
forced new lines)

As for Camino, I think I have a bigger problem with the fact that there is
nowhere near enough time to read the long enough to be truncated tooltip then I
do it being truncated to begin with.

Comment 11

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

It is unclear to me that how Camino/Chimera handled the testcases when this bug
was opened.  The current situation with this bug seems to be that Camino
2004103108 (v0.8+) displays tooltips for TITLE attributes of a certain text
length, but doesn't wrap them, and doesn't display tooltips at all if the TITLE
text is "too long."

e.g. Attachment 98398 [details] seems to display a tooltip that stretches the entire width
of my 17" PB's screen and may yet be cut off, while Attachment 123085 [details] displays
no tooltip whatsoever (its text is 3-4x as long).

It seems that in the latter case, it would be better to show at least a partial
tooltip (ending with the elipsis character) than nothing at all....  (On the
other hand, both seem like extreme abuse of the attribute.)

Comment 12

[Jasper]

Marking as a dup of Bug 248488. I will rename that bug to reflect the title of
this bug as this one is more elaborate.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 248488 ***