Special interest group for tooltip-related bugs?

[johann_p]

I have a proposal how to maybe get something going with bugs 45375 and related bugs. Bug 45375 is one of the oldest bugs, it is ugly and solving it would benefit many web pages and intranet solutions that loose long title tips for help and explanation.

Unfortunately, no core developer seems to be interested and those who are interested are simply too overwhelmed by the involved code to come up with something useful. Discussing the details of the code and learning more about it cannot be done in bugzilla however.

My suggestion would be that all those who are interested to help, learn about the code and discuss possible solutions gather here or in one of the mozilla newgroups to be able to exchange lengthy discussions about the code and help each other understand how it could work. Maybe some core developer or somebody who has more detailled knowledge will even step in at some point and help. In any way, the thread could not only help those that are interested now but also help as a starting point for those who join the SIG later.

What do you think?

[Moby]

Splendid idea. I will gonna try and help.. that bug is really annoying.

[old momokatte]

What's really blocking this (multi-line tooltips) is a technical limitation. The tooltips use a single XUL 'label' element, which is designed to only display text on one line and optionally crop the text with an ellipsis.

The Bookmarks Toolbar tooltips contain two XUL 'label' elements, one for the title and one for the URL, but they also individually have the single-line limit.

So. Long story short -- the tooltips, in their current state, can't support wrapping or line breaks. Someone probably needs to define a new tooltip binding just for the 'tabbrowser' element, using a 'description' element instead of a 'label' element.

[johann_p]

What's really blocking this (multi-line tooltips) is a technical limitation. The tooltips use a single XUL 'label' element, which is designed to only display text on one line and optionally crop the text with an ellipsis.

The Bookmarks Toolbar tooltips contain two XUL 'label' elements, one for the title and one for the URL, but they also individually have the single-line limit.

So. Long story short -- the tooltips, in their current state, can't support wrapping or line breaks. Someone probably needs to define a new tooltip binding just for the 'tabbrowser' element, using a 'description' element instead of a 'label' element.

The description element will only show a single line either, if the value is set via the value attribute. So in order to try this, one would need to attach the text as if the element would look like this:

Code: Select all

<description>the text ...</description>

- but how? Also what kind of html tags or styling would be possible in the text then? I am asking this because of the related bug that wants the ability to insert line breaks deliberately.

Another question - how/where is the width of the label element currently calculated?

BTW - why define the tooltip binding just for the tabbrowser element? Wouldn't this be potentially useful in other contexts too where cropped tooltips are a problem now (e.g. showing long filenames, headers, subjects ...)?

[johann_p]

¡ Ian Neal just attached a patch to bug 67127 that also does wrapping - seems to work like a charm!
This is really great ..

[iamnotniles]

Does this make it's way directly into Firebird / Thunderbird or does it only affect SeaMonkey?

[Moby]

Wow. I did look into the patch now, and I must admit, I would never ever have looked there for an solution. Mozilla seems to be a very complicated and huge and vaste reached solution. Congratz to the guys, who knows where to twiddle things in there.

[townba]

I patched popup.xml inside chrome/toolkit.jar in the Firebird installation directory. In the limited number of cases I tried, it did indeed wrap the text.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6b) Gecko/20031201 Firebird/0.7+