[Sigia-l] Link to Search Field Labels

[Alfonso Corretti]

On Thu, 2004-02-19 at 11:00, Listera wrote:
> Yes, but if you visit a form field multiple times, as it happens, the popup
> will popup every time.

Sure, it is annoying to get an info you already know, and the annoy
increases if you are an everyday user of that web application.

But what I didn't mentioned, maybe because it's a specific functionality
of Plone, is that when you are a 'registered' user, Plone gives you the
option to disable those tooltips, as an implicit declaration of the user
knowledge of the tasks.

This can be achieved without the need of a "user registration"
functionality, just using cookies and a bit of server-side processing.


> > And, in addition, the implementation of this trick is fair simple. Just
> > take a look at the source code and you'll find it's based in the CSS
> > visibility property, and a couple of javascript events to set/unset that
> > property.
> 
> One of the reasons to use persistent comments is, in fact, the possibility
> of JavaScript being off.
> 
> I don't have any strong feelings against tool tips, but whenever I can, I'd
> rather not hide/show the info but make it visible/persistent. That's one of
> the reasons I almost never use app-level menus when designing standalone or
> C/S apps, you never know something is hidden behind a menu until you go
> foraging through all.

<IMHO>

In the fact of javascript being off, I can't imagine a rich WWW
environment as we've got right know, without the use of client-side
scripting. W3C understood this and developed the DOM to gratefully
integrate ECMAScript (the foundry of many of the ~Script languages)
across platforms in a standard way. So, I think we always can use
standard JavaScript in the web environment (old <NOSCRIPT> days are
really far away from year 2004).

Another completely different case is the accessibility. It mixes
content-layout separation, user-agent sniffing and a plenty of different
languages and practices to achieve a usefully integrated world wide web.

And in the fact of hiding/showing information, we must differ 
Navigational Information from Contextual Help Information. The first is
absolutely necessary to achieve any task, as it drives the user to the
concrete tasks. The second is "optional" information, necessary only in
some cases. And here I must appoint that having that info in another
different page is even more confusing than the need to know how to
disable those annoying (only when are reiterative) tooltips.

</IMHO>

Cheers, and thanks for such a rich discussion! :-)

-- 
Alfonso Corretti <alfonso.corretti at hispalinux.es>
HISPALiNUX - Asociación Española de Usuarios de GNU/Linux