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.
Received on 2010-02-09 12:09:18 CET