On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 12:42 PM, Remember the dotrememberthedot@gmail.com wrote:
In Håkon Wium Lie's recent analysis of Wikipedia image markup ( http://www.princexml.com/howcome/2009/wikipedia/image/), he makes a good point: we include image captions both below images and again in the images' tooltips. Also, for inline images without explicitly defined tooltips, the image name is used as the tooltip even though it is also shown in the URL when mousing over the image. Neither of these automatic tooltips are really useful, and they slow down page load time on image-heavy pages.
What do you think? Should we keep the redundant tooltips, or start leaving them out?
Interesting, I never noticed them before - I generally use a script (can't remember the name) which shows something completely different when you mouseover anyway.
Testing while logged out, it looks like IE7 doesn't display them. Chrome does - and they look ridiculous. A long caption displayed as a tooltip is worse than useless.
So as far as I'm concerned, either make the tooltip display something useful (like the name of the file), or get rid of them. Though there might be accessibility issues - perhaps they're useful for screen readers or something.
Steve