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Technical note.

You may or may not have noticed the footnotes I stick in the hyperlinks hereabouts (hover your mouse over them, if not); I like to tuck a little snarky context in them. Helps with some of the jokes. —Of course, you might have noticed the footnotes, but if you’re using Firefox, you probably couldn’t read them, since Firefox trims the <title> tag by default, and it’s downright impossible to figure out how to reset it in about:config. But luckily, there’s an extension for just about everything in Firefox; a little judicious Googling (far less than I’d feared) turned up the Popup ALT Attribute, which was built to allow people who’d been misusing the <alt> tag for tooltips (conditioned, apparently, by that evil former monolith, Explorer) to keep doing so; as a sideline, it includes “multiline tooltip,” which tells Firefox to stop truncating those mutiline footnotes. Seems to work fine so far, though of course your mileage may vary; I’m pleased to note it process a hyperlinked image properly, by my standards, which is to say it displays the <title> tag of the link rather than the <alt> tag of the image, with nary a moment of confusion.

And that’s as geeky as I plan to get today. Back to the zombies. That I can’t call zombies. Long story; I’ll tell you about it someday.

  1. Sebbo    Jan 8, 12:41 pm    #
    Here's a server-based solution. Add the javascript to LSSP pages, and you'll get custom pretty title text in any ol' browser. You can see it in action over at my place.

  2. Lisa    Jan 8, 03:19 pm    #
    Those are NOT footnotes my lad; those are glosses, or, if you must, annotations.

  3. Kip    Jan 8, 04:46 pm    #
    Well, maybe you don’t tuck your feet away in a Calabi-Yau manifold when you’re not using them...

  4. mcubed    Jan 9, 09:14 am    #
    The footnotes/annotations display just fine (sans truncation) in Camino without the need for any extensions. Oh, but I forgot, "Firefox uber alles," right?

  5. Kip    Jan 9, 11:49 am    #

    Not quite über alles; Firefox and IE are tied at 43% each as far as browsers that view this site go. Safari’s at 9%; Opera’s at 5%. Camino doesn’t even register. I will admit that it looks like it will soon be a browser of choice, but the site’s copy makes it clear—“While this software may work well enough to be relied upon as your primary browser, we make no guarantees of its performance or stability in its pre-1.0 state”—that it’s still a wee-bit bleeding-edge to earn the weariness that sound so jaded on your tongue.


  6. Nick Fagerlund    Jan 12, 01:55 am    #
    Gracious, Popup Alt has improved quite a bit since last we crossed paths -- it never used to do the right thing for an image with both alt and title.

    For a decent while, I was getting long-title tooltips by manually patching a file called popup.xml, which was buried somewhere in toolkit.jar. This was exactly as much of a pain as it sounds like, especially since toolkit.jar gets overwritten with every upgrade. Lately, I'd just been sucking it up, calling in Paren Tips on sites with heavy titling. So long to all that, then.

    As for our other tangent. At this point, my experience sez Camino is mostly bulletproof, beta or no, and yes, it's also pretty as heck and blazingly fast. But it's a little feature-poor for my taste. I love it for quick look-up jobs, but it's Firefox all the way for any browsing session that's going to last more than ten minutes. (The explanation boils down to Cmd-K, the UndoCloseTab extension, tab reordering, and some extra search plugins.) I'm glad Camino's got some partisans, though; my pal Josh put in some heavy hours on the thing.

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