GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 136697
Show tooltip with URL on links
Last modified: 2009-03-20 10:35:13 UTC
I'd be nice to show a tooltip with the URL of links when you hover over them, this (seeing the URL where a link points) is the only reason I actually have the status bar enabled, and I'd like to get rid of it :)
Sounds reasonable. Need to think about how this would combine with tooltips shown via the <title> tag (prolly just new line i suppose).
Btw, Opera does this already.
Created attachment 25479 [details] Opera screenshot
Created attachment 25783 [details] [review] proof-of-concept
Created attachment 25884 [details] [review] complete solution, does not need to patch mozilla sources
Created attachment 25893 [details] [review] you'll also need this patch in addition to the last one
Comment on attachment 25783 [details] [review] proof-of-concept Marking obsolete attachments in open bugs.
Created attachment 27203 [details] [review] updated patch
Marco, can we make a decision on this?
Mass reassigning of Epiphany bugs to epiphany-maint@b.g.o
Created attachment 35010 [details] [review] ported to embed strings
I'm not convinced this is useful. First of all this conflicts with the TITLE attribute of hyperlinks, which is used to display a tooltip for a link by most visual browsers.[1][2] Secondly, a tooltip obscures other text on the page, and you have to cut it off somewhere because dynamically generated URLs often are ridiculously long. [1]http://www.devguru.com/features/knowledge_base/A100216.html [2]http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ig/2003JanMar/0171.html
Part of the underlying problem here is that tooltips are "broken by design" -- really there are lots of pieces of information that could pop up, some of which may need formatting. I don't want to see URLs on my screen somewhere I can't copy and paste them directly for example -- it's just frustrating. SVG 1.2 is moving to a structure in which link titles are in content, not attributes, so you can have a superscript, or ruby anotations for Kanji, or an emphasised word in a link title. Maybe even a link. Maybe an answer is small documents that fade away with time (yay translucency!) or that stay around if you move the mouse pointer (or tab) onto them, and then can contain a "link information" button or link. You also have to make sure that any solution works with 4KByte URLs and not just "www.google.com". The second problem, though, is that a URI is just an identifier. Maybe increasing the visibility of URIs in this way encourages people to read into them meaning that, strictly speaking, isn't there? Worse, maybe it encourages people to design Web sites that assume people will navigate by writing down URIs on scraps of paper and re-keying them?? That would be a step back for accessibilty. If the status bar is in the way, what about a patch to make it go away when it's not needed? I think really I'm (1) not in favour of adding weird hacks to "geekify" tooltips without a major rethink of their purpose, and (2) not wanting to emphasise URI contents in this way without knowing why people want it. Dragging the link onto the desktop should probably either open it or make an icon that opens the corresponding Web page when activated. There's a "copy link" context menu item. And there's the status bar. It's enough! Liam
How about showing an URL tooltip only if the status bar is hidden? Maybe it would be best to do what slashdot does: show only the domain name of the linked URL, to keep it short. If the link has a TITLE attribute, the domain name can be put on a new line, like we currently do with tooltips for toolbar bookmarks.
Yes, I'm definitely considering this for 1.11.
Ah, the nostalgia. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45733
We could do the underlining using a UA stylesheet, with the rules from https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14027#c19: a[href][target]:not([target="_self"]), link[href][target]:not([target="_self"]) { /* ideally we'd use a special property, (see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14027#c10) but this will do */ text-decoration: none; border-bottom: 2px dotted; }
I've added a translucent statusbar with the link-message that only appears when the normal statusbar is hidden. As far as I'm concerned this fixes the bug, so I'm closing it (only took 5 years!).