[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.
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.
--
Peter Samuelson | org-tld!p12n!peter | http://p12n.org/
Received on 2010-02-09 01:02:21 CET