Last modified: 2014-11-17 10:35:08 UTC

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Bug 3550 - Character insertion box should have titles for the characters
Character insertion box should have titles for the characters
Status: NEW
Product: MediaWiki extensions
Classification: Unclassified
CharInsert (Other open bugs)
unspecified
All All
: Low normal with 2 votes (vote)
: ---
Assigned To: Nobody - You can work on this!
: accessibility
Depends on:
Blocks:
  Show dependency treegraph
 
Reported: 2005-09-26 02:49 UTC by Omegatron
Modified: 2014-11-17 10:35 UTC (History)
4 users (show)

See Also:
Web browser: ---
Mobile Platform: ---
Assignee Huggle Beta Tester: ---


Attachments

Description Omegatron 2005-09-26 02:49:57 UTC
The character insertion bar at the bottom of the edit window should have title
tags for each character (in the HTML of the a link), so we can tell which is
which.  I am specifically talking about the difference between en dash and minus
sign, but I'm sure there are other cases where this would be helpful.  The fact
that they are grouped with similar things helps for now..
Comment 1 Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 2005-10-01 21:01:56 UTC
And what would this title tag contain, for instance in the case of endash and minus?
Comment 2 Omegatron 2005-10-01 21:14:15 UTC
you would be able to hover over the endash and see a tooltip that said "en
dash", so you could differentiate it.  :-)
Comment 3 Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 2005-10-12 09:34:20 UTC
This would require the extension to have a database of character => character
name values, do you know of any such database we could use, one for every
assigned character in Unicode would be nice.
Comment 4 Omegatron 2005-10-12 13:58:35 UTC
(In reply to comment #3)
> This would require the extension to have a database of character => character
> name values, do you know of any such database we could use, one for every
> assigned character in Unicode would be nice.

I don't know of any such database.  Here is a list of named HTML entities:

http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/entities/

I can see that it would be helpful to have tooltips for things like the
difference between, say, the degree sign and the ordinal operator, too, and for
things like A with acute accent, for those of us who don't use those characters
often.
Comment 5 Rob Church 2005-10-12 14:27:11 UTC
Musing out loud; perhaps it would be possible for a script to parse that page
and create a table containing what we need...I think I might have a little
look-see...
Comment 6 Omegatron 2005-12-14 22:46:28 UTC
Here's another small reason this would be useful:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Curpsbot-unicodify#unicode_robot_on_the_math_pages.3F

It would allow people to quickly look up the html entity if they want to type
them by hand.
Comment 7 lɛʁi לערי ריינהארט 2005-12-14 23:22:51 UTC
Hallo!

Will this request be covered by the request from bug 3821 comment 13?
See bug 3821: Define and implement a markup syntax for CharInsert

best regards reinhardt [[user:gangleri]]
Comment 8 Tisza Gergő 2006-06-05 09:27:10 UTC
Fileformat.info has a table which could be parsed easily:
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/a.htm
Comment 9 Marcin Jeske 2008-03-30 00:26:32 UTC
the discussion kinda got derailed by talk of where to lookup the names of symbols to display.... but that is beyond the point... the CharInsert Extension would benefit by supporting tooltips... the issue of where the tooltip text comes from can be left up to whoever is writing the charinsert tags.

In the case of the default charinsert tags, these titles could come from http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/sgml/entities.html as that is the set of characters we are really defacto limited to in HTML... the last part of each entity reference is probably the most appropriate for human consumption, so for example ¡ would get the title "inverted exclamation mark".
Specific installs of MediaWiki could add or modify the titles to suit their user base... so it should be part of the charinsert syntax
The reasons for this are:
- some charinsert characters are really small and difficult to see/distinguish - example:
-- dashes –—−
-- diacriticals úùüūǔǖǚǘ
-- crossed lines łt
-- these are Arabic - ِ-ً-ْ-ّ-ء-ﻫﻣوﻭﻮﺭ
- many people do not differentiate between an en-dash and an em-dash - a tooltip would help them do that
-- apply the same reasoning to hundreds of other symbols that commonly get confused
-improved accessibility

Not sure all these characters will come through correctly... I have made basically the same comment at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension_talk:CharInsert#Tooltips_for_CharInsert

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