Here’s a minor annoyance in Firefox
The A and ACRONYM and IMG tags in HTML all can take a TITLE attribute. This attribute gives you a “tooltip” popup when you hover over it with your mouse. So if you hover your mouse over one of the pictures of me in the sidebar, you’ll get an explanation of what it’s a picture of.
Note that IE also uses the ALT attribute for tooltips in IMGs. This is actually not part of the W3C standard for HTML (ALT is supposed to be used as text replacement for images, which is a bit different from explanations of what the images are). There’s hot debate over whether IE’s de facto standard here should be implemented in Firefox/Mozilla, but, for the moment, it’s not. And I’m okay with that.
What I’m not okay with is that the W3C spec for TITLE tooltips does not support line breaks. So if the width of the TITLE attribute is wider than some relatively short span of lines, it will be truncated — in Firefox — with a set of elipses.
IE — defining the world its own way, of course — will display the full TITLE text as a tooltip.
Which is why IE users get nice, verbose explanations of abbreviations in the Glossary of the sidebar, whereas Firefox users get truncated ones.
Feh.
As someone wrote on one page I found, “[T]echnically Mozilla has implemented to the spec. The spec doesn’t allow for line breaks in the title attribute either. The spec is stupid. :)”
Agreed. Fortunately, it’s in the queue to (maybe) get fixed for Firefox — but the bug has been in Mozilla for a couple of years, with little action on it.
Alternately, you can support your non-IE users via CSS. There are several solutions floating around out there.
First off, there’s a little code snip that I found that puts the tooltip, line breaks included, under both IE and non-IE entries. Unfortunately, it’s Javascript-driven, and won’t work for folks who have Javascript disabled (mouse over any of my permalink or comment fields on my blog to see it in action).
The second thing you can do is hovering CSS blocks. This only works on non-IE machines, though. It’s what I use for my blogroll (i.e. Good Links area on the right navigation bar on my site).
Yes, I wish there was a (unified) better way to do things.
D
There’s also a Firefox patch/extension that does linewrapping and shows ALTs, but the install looked a little hairy.