60260 - Navigation toolbar is missing lots of tooltips

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(SeaMonkey :: UI Design, defect, P3)

Description

[[e-mail] (gone - use [e-mail] instead)]

The navigation toolbar is missing tooltips for the Page Proxy icon and the Print
icon.  I'm not sure what the spec on this is, but 4.7x's behaviour has tooltips
on both of these items.

Comment 1

[R.K.Aa.]

linux 2000111508 is missing tooltips as well:

back-button
forward-button
print-button

If there were ever separate tooltips for the "triangles" on these buttons, those
are missing as well.

In addition: On personal toolbar, tooltip for "Bookmarks" missing.

Comment 2

[Loren Cannon]

same 2000111404

Comment 3

[R.K.Aa.]

My comment above was for browser window.
In mailnews, "File"-button tooltip is missing.

Comment 4

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

Don't think this is a design issue, just a simple oversight. --> XP Apps: GUI.

Comment 5

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

hunh, weird --using 2000.11.16.08 mozilla linux [trunk] sea bits, i don't have
this problem. doublechecked defaults/pref/unix.js and i do indeed have
pref("browser.chrome.toolbar_tips", true); set.

how about today's bits? claudius/pink?

Comment 6

[Mike Pinkerton (not reading bugmail)]

this isn't my recent tooltip work, given that those don't have tooltips in ns6.0
ether.

Comment 7

[[e-mail] (gone - use [e-mail] instead)]

Also, in the Mail/News window, Print and the throbber are also missing tooltips.
Tooltip for the throbber should read, "Go to the Netscape home page."

Comment 8

[Blake Ross]

i guess I'll do this.  removing pink, he probably doesn't care about this ;)  
can someone give me a list of elements on the navigation toolbar still missing 
tooltips, and the text to use?

Comment 9

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

Blake, if you need the strings (i.e. if they're not already lying around in a 
file somewhere), then this isn't a regression.

Anyway ... I started out making a list of the missing tooltips and what they 
should be, and I got hopelessly lost. You want the good news, or the bad news?

References:
<http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/books/winguide/ch08c.htm>
<http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/mac/HIGuidelines/HIGuidelines-243.html>

The good news is that Microsoft suggests using tooltips of only one or two words 
for toolbar buttons, which means giving Blake the text for these tooltips should 
be easy.

The bad news is that in saying that, Microsoft are assuming that the buttons do 
not contain text already, and in Mozilla they do (except, just to make life 
difficult, in the Modern skin for Navigator). And we don't want
<http://iarchitect.com/stupid.htm#STUPID27> to happen again.

The good news is that it's reasonably easy to guess what to do in this case -- 
provide an explanation of about half a dozen words about what the button does.

The bad news is that half a dozen words don't really provide much help. If they 
do, that's a good sign that the text in the button itself is badly worded.

The good news is that well-behaved Mac OS apps don't have tooltips -- they have 
help balloons instead, which typically have more text in them. E.g. while a 
tooltip for the Back button would say `Back', a help balloon for the Back button 
would say:
------
To go to the previous page, click this
button (or press Command+Left Arrow).

Not available because you have not
visited any pages before this one in
this window.
------
That provides enough information to be useful, and also allows inclusion of the 
keyboard shortcut for the button (see also bug 53309).

The bad news is that Windows 95 and 98 don't support help balloons.

The good news is that Windows 2000 has introduced help balloons, so we're not 
breaking platform conventions if we use them.

The bad news is that Mac OS X has stupidly *dropped* support for help balloons, 
thinking that HTML help is enough ...

So, ahem. Pink, how hard would it be to reimplement help balloons in XPToolkit, 
so that they could be used for Mozilla on any platform (including Mac OS X)? 
Initially they could be just multi-line tooltips, and the hard stuff like 
transparent rounded corners could be done later.

I realize this is somewhat wandering the track off this bug, but whether tooltips 
or balloons are used heavily affects what the fix for this bug would be.

Comment 10

[Blake Ross]

Balloons would be extremely awkward on Windows.

Comment 11

[Blake Ross]

not a priority.

Comment 12

[Viswanath Ramachandran]

nav triage team: docs team to tell us what the strings for the tooltips ought to
be. 

Comment 13

[Paul Chen]

nav triage team:

Marking nsbeta1+

Comment 14

[[e-mail] (gone - use [e-mail] instead)]

Attachment: Patch to fix all but the Page Proxy icon.

Comment 15

[Daniel Brooks [:db48x]]

r=[e-mail]

Everything that I can put on the toolbar (optional buttons etc) has a tooltip,
so I guess that'll do it.

Comment 16

[Ben Goodger (use ben at mozilla dot org for email)]

Looks ok for now so a=ben, but for the record, the original intent was to show 
text in the tooltip equivalent to 'Go back to <page title>'

Comment 17

[[e-mail] (gone - use [e-mail] instead)]

Fix checked in.  Thanks to Ben Goodger and Daniel Brooks for quick reviews.
I'll file a new bug for implementing the correct title strings for the back and 
forward buttons.

Comment 18

[[e-mail] (gone - use [e-mail] instead)]

The new bug is filed as
/cvsroot/mozilla/xpfe/browser/resources/content/navigator.xul

Comment 19

[[e-mail] (gone - use [e-mail] instead)]

The new bug is filed as bug 71405.

Comment 20

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

mass-verifying claudius' Fixed bugs which haven't changed since 2001.12.31.

if you think this particular bug is not fixed, please make sure of the following
before reopening:

a. retest with a *recent* trunk build.
b. query bugzilla to see if there's an existing, open bug (new, reopened,
assigned) that covers your issue.
c. if this does need to be reopened, make sure there are specific steps to
reproduce (unless already provided and up-to-date).

thanks!

[set your search string in mail to "AmbassadorKoshNaranek" to filter out these
messages.]