Should "tool tips" on SC be eliminated?

Meta dev
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I think we should stop adding title tool tips to the site.

  1. They don’t aid in accessibility
  2. They aren’t usable on touch/mobile
  3. They have to be internationalized
  4. Many people don’t even know that things can be hovered over, especially since it’s hit or miss what has them and what doesn’t

For example, all of these things on the home page have tool tips but they don’t even add good information to the experience:

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If it weren’t for localization/internationalization I probably wouldn’t care. But we get very little benefit for the cost of translating them all (when we think about all the languages we are supporting now).

Thoughts?

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I just realized that the tooltips over the “level” icon is the only way to get an explanation of what that means. E.g. for DN1:

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It’s kind of a separate issue, but the fact that this information is available only in a tooltip is not great.

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The level icon that is meant to be a tree always makes me think of broccoli.

Generally, I think we don’t need them. Tooltips that is. I like broccoli

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Thanks, Ven Pasanna, can’t make it unseen now :smile: - love broccoli!

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Perhaps it is broccoli. Slightly bitter, not everyone likes, but it’s very good for you.

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Good suggestion, we should definitely remove as many as possible.

As background, I want to remove the native title attribute completely and where necessary replace it with a high quality, accessible tooltip.

Our components are from Google’s material web project, and I have been patiently waiting many many many years for the Google team to make a tooltip component. Here’s what I’ll look like when they’re done.


This is part of a larger issue, because a tooltip is most heavily used for text notes. Currently we use a very elegantly primitive CSS implementation, but we want to do it properly. There’s a long standing issue for this:

Basically the idea would be to use a single tooltip implementation across the app.

Meanwhile, it would certainly help to remove unnecessary tooltips. I don’t think there are very many? But worth checking them out.

And if someone wants to look into floating-ui or something similar, that would be great.

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[Oh my god. I read this message in an email and automatically corrected your “typo” to read “Here’s what it’ll look like when they’re done.” I clicked through to the forum and could not figure out what was going on.]

There are not many. I will hunt them down. And throw them into a bog.

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