Site Ratings & Reviews - title value within anchor tag??

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title value within anchor tag??

Andrew D

2004-08-27, 7:17 pm

I see that the "title" value inside an anchor tag gives a small "pop-up"
description in Mozilla Firefox. How well-supported is this feature? Are
there known problems with using it in browsers that don't support it?

Ta.

--
Andy D.
http://members.westnet.com.au/andydolphin/
Fine art gallery - online, Western Australia
Landscapes, seascapes and still life paintings in oils.

Neal

2004-08-27, 7:17 pm

On Fri, 27 Aug 2004 22:43:58 +0800, Andrew D <andyd@elsewhere.com> wrote:

> I see that the "title" value inside an anchor tag gives a small "pop-up"
> description in Mozilla Firefox. How well-supported is this feature? Are
> there known problems with using it in browsers that don't support it?
>
> Ta.
>

title is valid in nearly all elements. And it produces a tooltip on most
major browsers I've used. But relying on it for usability might not be
wise.

Andy Dingley

2004-08-31, 12:18 pm

On Fri, 27 Aug 2004 22:43:58 +0800, andyd@elsewhere.com (Andrew D)
wrote:

>I see that the "title" value inside an anchor tag gives a small "pop-up"
>description in Mozilla Firefox. How well-supported is this feature?

A "feature" is a facility implemented on a particular browser - so for
Firefox, then it works, and it works reliably.

An attribute in HTML is valid everywhere (and certainly shouldn't
break things) but there is _no_ strong requirement for any particular
browser to do anything with it, and certainly no suggestion that it
should trigger a pop-up as opposed to the status line or other
feedback.

For <a title="..." > then it's far from reliably implemented
elsewhere, as a pop-up or whatever - but it's common enough to be
worth doing. You should use it, because it's a good thing and not
harmful, but don't be surprised when it's not shown.

As good practice, I suggest using title on all links. I also suggest
using title on images, as well as simultaneously using alt (and the
rules for what to put in there are similar, although not identical).
Firefox is getting popular these days and it _doesn't_ use alt text as
a pop-up over an image (as IE does) - it only uses title for this.
This is arguably correct behaviour, but IMHO was a bad move for
compatibility - it should display alt as a pop-up if there's no title
attribute.

I also suggest reading the HTML DTD a little (at the W3C site) and
particularly the use of "coreattrs". Pretty much every element can
take title, id, class and style attributes.

--
Smert' spamionam

Toby Inkster

2004-09-03, 4:16 am

Andy Dingley wrote:

> For <a title="..." > then it's far from reliably implemented
> elsewhere, as a pop-up or whatever - but it's common enough to be
> worth doing.

Well, it's supported by Gecko, Trident, Tasman, Presto, Opera-Classic,
KHTML, Dillo and Lynx, which is reliable enough for me. (And that's by no
means an exhaustive list.)

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me ~ http://tobyinkster.co.uk/contact
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