557166 - in tooltip contents of SVG anchors, xlink:title shouldn't be suppressed by child elements svg:title

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Jeff Schiller]

In Firefox 3.6-:

<a xlink:title="This is the xlink:title">
  <circle .../>
</a>

would display "This is the xlink:title" when the circle was hovered regardless of even if the xlink:href attribute was present.  In fact, even if the xlink:title was on the <circle> and the <a> was missing this would work.  Prior to Bug 329212 and Bug 547854 being fixed in Firefox 3.7+, this was the way to get a tooltip to display in Firefox in SVG.

Those bugs changed the behavior of the browser to start acknowledging svg:title elements as tooltips, which is great.

However, we need to think about the following case:

<a xlink:title="foo" ...>
  <circle ...>
    <title>bar</title>
  </circle>
</a>

In this case, what should be displayed as the tooltip when the circle is hovered: "foo" or "bar" ?  Firefox 3.7 displays "bar".  All other browsers display "foo" (Firefox 3.6-, Opera, Safari, Chrome).

I believe this should be corrected in Firefox 3.7.

Comment 1

[Robert Longson [:longsonr]]

w3c should specify how this works. Please raise this issue with them.

Comment 2

[Jeff Schiller]

http://www.w3.org/TR/SVGTiny12/struct.html#uiTitleDescBehavior

"When an element with descriptive elements is itself the child of an 'a' element with an 'xlink:title' attribute, the user agent should display as much of the available information as possible. The user agent is suggested to display the 'xlink:title' attribute value on a separate line, with a label to identify it, such as "link: "... This information is important, and should not be overridden by any descriptive element content, but may be supplemented by such content. "

Or you could follow what all other browsers are defacto doing :)

Comment 3

[Robert Longson [:longsonr]]

Or you as an author could just put a title on the a element and avoid this issue altogether :-)

Comment 4

[Jeff Schiller]

And all the existing content I have that used to work?

Comment 5

[Helder "Lthere" Magalhães]

xlink:title seems to work [1] as expected: attachment 428300 [details], of bug 547854, proves it (place the mouse over the rightmost circle). This issue's title was therefore a little misleading IMO so I reworked it (and took the opportunity to tweak a few bug properties). :-)

[1] Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.3a5pre) Gecko/20100410 Minefield/3.7a5pre (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

Comment 6

[Sahab Yazdani]

The attachment from Helder in Comment #5, uses the xlink:href="" attribute on the green circle to get the tooltip to show up in FF4. With FF3.6, the xlink:href="" attribute is not necessary. That is where the two implementations diverge.