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The title attribute has multiple uses, sometimes confusingly. They mainly support tooltips. In the abbr and old acronym elements, they commonly support both tooltips and text-to-speech (TTS) pronunciations. In another element or two or so, they have other uses. While tooltips are often positive, they can interfere with a user experience when they pop up but don't add useful information or even are interesting. To turn them off requires not having the title attribute but that denies text-to-speech support (in their absence, TTS generates default pronunciations, which may be wrong and even hard to comprehend). E.g., the form "<abbr title="+15553676287">+1-555-FORMATS</abbr>" is required in the hCard spec (http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard (as accessed 9-22-09)) but it leads to a TTS error if the page author wants TTS to say "1 5 5 5 formats". The error is not W3C's but is due to a shortage of attributes to serve the range of needs in the wild. A more semantic and dedicated attribute would clarify page authors' intentions. I propose a tooltip attribute for most or all elements that could appear in a body element. The title attribute should be kept for other uses but its use for tooltips should be deprecated. Thank you. -- Nick
Wouldn't it be more useful to have an attribute for descriptive information that doesn't display as a tooltip at all, either in future or existing browsers? Then title="" can then be reserved for use cases that do want a tooltip. Adding a tooltip attribute would not solve the problem that the abbr markup you cited produces a tooltip.
The example you give is non-conforming HTML5; title="" isn't allowed to be used like that per HTML5. Microdata uses <meta> for including data like this.
> Wouldn't it be more useful to have an attribute for descriptive information that doesn't display as a tooltip at all, either in future or existing browsers? . . . . Either approach would fulfill demand and either approach would have the same problem of version compatibility. Since there's a general goal of keeping HTML and other languages semantic, I think an attribute meant for tooltips should be called tooltip, and something for multiple or residual uses should have a more general name, for which title, already established, will do. > title="" isn't allowed to be used like that . . . . Okay, thus the need for more methods to satisfy needs. Use for TTS seemed to be widespread a while back, causing a usability conflict with tooltips use. Both TTS and microformats have good use cases, and both are being shoehorned into the title attribute. We should hand out a more comfortable shoe, i.e., a more semantic attribute. > Microdata uses <meta> for including data like this. No, as to microformats. And that's complicated. They don't use meta now (<http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard>, Property Notes, n. 2, & Human vs. Machine readable, as accessed 10-3-09). The latter says, "If an <abbr> element is used for a property, then the 'title' attribute (if present) of the <abbr> element is the value of the property, instead of the contents of the element, which instead provide a more human presentable version of the value." If they should use meta, they'll have to amend, but using meta in a head makes parsing of an hCard microformat in a body much more complicated, because page authors will have to write much larger heads and engines will have to apply many more steps. Adding an attribute seems simpler.
I didn't say microformats, I said microdata. As far as I can tell, <meta> is the solution to your request.
My errors in conflating microdata and microformats, as acknowledged in <http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=7800#c2>, when I saw the new provisions, and in not noticing till now that now meta is allowed in body for flow and phrasing if it has the itemprop attribute. Thanks.
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