Hello fellow developers,
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?
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
Remember the dot wrote:
What do you think? Should we keep the redundant tooltips, or start leaving them out?
I'm in the camp that considers them redundant. If the title isn't adding anything that isn't already visible, it's not helping.
One suggestion that hasn't been mentioned is leaving these as titles in interactive settings (tooltip in web page) and using CSS to generate inline text in others (caption when printed). Online, images that have a tooltip could be distinguished from those that don't by some subtle effect, like maybe a thin border.
Tim
Tim Larson schrieb:
Remember the dot wrote:
What do you think? Should we keep the redundant tooltips, or start leaving them out?
I'm in the camp that considers them redundant. If the title isn't adding anything that isn't already visible, it's not helping.
One suggestion that hasn't been mentioned is leaving these as titles in interactive settings (tooltip in web page) and using CSS to generate inline text in others (caption when printed). Online, images that have a tooltip could be distinguished from those that don't by some subtle effect, like maybe a thin border.
It would be very nice to display meta information about the image, like author and license, on hover. However, this will only become possible when we have that info in the database at all...
-- daniel
2009/6/23 Remember the dot rememberthedot@gmail.com:
Hello fellow developers,
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.
This is actually only the case if you use the keyword 'thumb' or 'frame'. If you just do [[file:foo.jpg|this is my caption]], then you only get the "tooltip" (usually called "alt" text for images). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt_attribute
You may be interested in reading this English Wikipedia guideline, as part of its Manual of Style: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Alternative_text_for_images In short, alt text is important for accessibility.
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.
They might not be useful for you, but they are useful for others. On what basis do you say they slow down page load time? I would be surprised to find that supplying or not supplying alt text made any difference.
Brianna
Actually, my comment is not entirely relevant, as the caption is actually coming from the 'title' attribute of the link around the image. The image itself has no alt text......I don't know why it would be implemented in this way.
Brianna
2009/6/23 Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com:
2009/6/23 Remember the dot rememberthedot@gmail.com:
Hello fellow developers,
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.
This is actually only the case if you use the keyword 'thumb' or 'frame'. If you just do [[file:foo.jpg|this is my caption]], then you only get the "tooltip" (usually called "alt" text for images). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt_attribute
You may be interested in reading this English Wikipedia guideline, as part of its Manual of Style: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Alternative_text_for_images In short, alt text is important for accessibility.
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.
They might not be useful for you, but they are useful for others. On what basis do you say they slow down page load time? I would be surprised to find that supplying or not supplying alt text made any difference.
Brianna
-- They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment: http://modernthings.org/
2009/6/23 Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com:
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.
They might not be useful for you, but they are useful for others. On what basis do you say they slow down page load time? I would be surprised to find that supplying or not supplying alt text made any difference.
You're right, this sounds like absolute nonsense. The time it takes to set and/or display these tooltips is nothing compared to the time it takes to download and display the images themselves. Image-heavy pages load slowly because they contain a lot of images (surprise!), most other factors are negligible.
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)
On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 8:37 AM, Roan Kattouw roan.kattouw@gmail.com wrote:
2009/6/23 Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com:
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.
They might not be useful for you, but they are useful for others. On what basis do you say they slow down page load time? I would be surprised to find that supplying or not supplying alt text made any difference.
You're right, this sounds like absolute nonsense. The time it takes to set and/or display these tooltips is nothing compared to the time it takes to download and display the images themselves. Image-heavy pages load slowly because they contain a lot of images (surprise!), most other factors are negligible.
I thought someone might say that. Perhaps I care more about performance because I've had to endure several insufferably slow connections, and I don't want to waste limited bandwidth downloading redundant tooltips. Sometimes I even turn images off to improve speed, but the tooltips, as part of the page, must still be downloaded.
In any case, as others have pointed out, there are more reasons than performance why the redundant tooltips are a bad idea.
-- Remember the dot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Remember_the_dot
On 24/06/2009, at 7:50 AM, Remember the dot wrote:
On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 8:37 AM, Roan Kattouw roan.kattouw@gmail.com wrote:
2009/6/23 Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com:
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.
They might not be useful for you, but they are useful for others. On what basis do you say they slow down page load time? I would be surprised to find that supplying or not supplying alt text made any difference.
You're right, this sounds like absolute nonsense. The time it takes to set and/or display these tooltips is nothing compared to the time it takes to download and display the images themselves. Image-heavy pages load slowly because they contain a lot of images (surprise!), most other factors are negligible.
I thought someone might say that. Perhaps I care more about performance because I've had to endure several insufferably slow connections, and I don't want to waste limited bandwidth downloading redundant tooltips. Sometimes I even turn images off to improve speed, but the tooltips, as part of the page, must still be downloaded.
The slowest connection I can possibly imagine you using is 14.4 kB/s. At this rate, you could still download fifteen unnecessary tooltips per second (with the perhaps unjustified assumption that there are few tooltips over 1kB).
-- Andrew Garrett Contract Developer, Wikimedia Foundation agarrett@wikimedia.org http://werdn.us
On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 7:40 PM, Andrew Garrettagarrett@wikimedia.org wrote:
The slowest connection I can possibly imagine you using is 14.4 kB/s.
That's twice as fast as the theoretical maximum speed of a 56 Kbps modem, and probably three or four times as fast as a 56 Kbps modem in practice.
At this rate, you could still download fifteen unnecessary tooltips per second (with the perhaps unjustified assumption that there are few tooltips over 1kB).
If you cut that down to five per second (about 56 Kbps speed), then you're talking about easily half a second extra for pages with a few large tooltips. Although after gzip it's probably more like, say, a tenth of a second? Nothing to sneeze at, anyway.
Cutting out unnecessary HTML does make a difference, especially to users with slow connections. Removing tooltips alone isn't going to change much, but every bit is an improvement. I bet we could cut out 10% of the size of an average page if we refactored the markup without removing anything useful.
This is all beside the point, though, since the tooltips are completely pointless and should be removed on that grounds alone.
On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 10:42 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?
We should definitely leave them out. They're clearly redundant. I tried to do this before, but the code for this is horrible and I gave up. The code to pass image attributes from the parser to the appropriate image-generating class (mostly in Linker) needs to be scrapped and rewritten from scratch.
On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 12:21 AM, Tim Larsonlarson@towncommons.com wrote:
One suggestion that hasn't been mentioned is leaving these as titles in interactive settings (tooltip in web page) and using CSS to generate inline text in others (caption when printed).
This would prohibit captions from containing markup, and not work in IE6 or IE7. Also, tooltips are not at all discoverable -- captions are a much better place to put info you expect people to actually read.
On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 12:52 AM, Brianna Laugherbrianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote:
This is actually only the case if you use the keyword 'thumb' or 'frame'. If you just do [[file:foo.jpg|this is my caption]], then you only get the "tooltip" (usually called "alt" text for images). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt_attribute
We're discussing the title attribute, not the alt attribute. They're entirely different. Alt text is incorrectly rendered as a tooltip by Internet Explorer if no title attribute is present, for historical reasons, but no other browser does this AFAIK. I don't think any screen reader uses the title attribute in place of the alt attribute, either.
Alt text can be set by itself now with [[Image:Foo.png|alt=xxx]], and this is currently the *only* way to set it for images with captions -- it's no longer the same as the caption by default.
They might not be useful for you, but they are useful for others.
Could you explain how a title attribute that duplicates caption text is useful to *anyone*?
Remember the dot wrote:
Hello fellow developers,
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?
Where redundant they're not supposed to be there; the duplication is a bug.
-- brion
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