Peter Samuelson wrote: > [Mark Phippard] >> I am curious why you find them distracting. Are you using a browser >> setting that makes them prominent? I never even see them unless I >> hover my mouse for a while. > > You don't find it distracting when you move your mouse onto some > whitespace out of the way of the text you're reading, and a moment > later something pops up under it? (And, the mouse being on some > whitespace out of the way of the text does not imply that the tooltip > will also be out of the way.) To me, popups of any sort are _always_ > distracting, so to offset this, they'd better convey something truly > useful. > >> I find them incredibly useful in constructing URL's with the anchors >> when I want to send someone something.
I'd like to note that I've always found the tooltips appearing over paragraphs very annoying. On my desktop, I use focus-follows-mouse style window focusing, i.e. I have to / want to hover my mouse over the browser to scroll it. And it often pops up those tooltips over the stuff I want to read, because I don't (want to) take too much care putting the mouse pointer at any exact place of the window. I never realised that I could use those tips to send people direct links, so I guess neither will the usual user visiting our website. I'd suggest creating the hover links on the header line only/limiting them otherwise, or else dropping them entirely. After all, it's not too difficult marking the beginning of a paragraph, right-clicking and choosing "show selection source" to see the <a name="foo"> (at least in firefox). The usual reader doesn't need this / know about this anyway. Also, what Peter said. ~Neels > > That never would have even occurred to me. The reason I moved the > mouse is so I can read the text, not so I can see an anchor name. My > browser won't even let me copy and paste the tooltip, the 5 seconds I > get with the anchor may or may not be long enough to retype it, and in > any case I can't retype it without moving my mouse focus into an editor > window, causing the tooltip to disappear. What an awkward UI for that > purpose. > > To my way of thinking, any page where it's important to be able to > retrieve anchor names is also long enough to have a table of contents. > (Or the contrapositive: If it's too short or simple for a table of > contents, why direct the user at a particular anchor?) And the links > in a TOC, unlike tooltips, _can_ be copied and pasted.
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