[imp] Better tooltips

[Oliver Kuhl]

> Just wanted to get input on this before (anf if) I commit this...
Here we go...

> Tooltip support using the "title" tag (on <a> links) is pretty sketchy and
> definitely not consistent across browsers.  As such, I've been playing
> around with some tooltip javascript libraries to see what I could come up
> with.  This was the best library I found:
In my opinion, the main argument to change it is the compatibility across 
browsers. So, its a good idea in general.

> DOM Tooltip  http://www.mojavelinux.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=127
It's a nice library an the tooltips look great. But: It doesn't support 
Netscape 4.x. Not that I like this browser (I actually hate it), but as IMP 
currently supports Netscape 4.x, you should be shure that you want to remove 
NS4 from the well-supported-browsers-list.

> Best of all, it is under the LGPL license so it could be easily absorbed
> into Horde.
That would save much time.

> Mainly, I've been playing with tooltips as a method to better view previews
> of messages in IMP.  I personally don't like the previews appearing in the
> Thread/subject field - it is much nicer to only see the previews when
> mousing over.  Using the title tag is limited because some browsers
> (Mozilla) limit it to 80 characters with no linebreaks allowed.  IE allows
> longer tooltips, but it's HTML support in the tooltips is extremely limited.
You're right - TITLE-tooltips are really limited. But I personally like the 
current working previews very much. I hope the DOM tooltip supports a defined 
delaytime. Otherwise moving the mouse over the messagesubjects would become a 
lightshow. I'm not sure if I would prefere this one. Nice would be a configure-
option to choose the type of preview.

> The DOM tooltip library provides clean, fast output in a fairly small
> package (the two JS files that need to be included are 30 KB - they
> theoretically can be cached by the browser since they are called via a
> <script src=""> tag).
The caching is very important. 30kb would be too much for modem or isdn users.

> Sample output looks like:
> http://bigworm.colorado.edu/imp/domtt.jpg
Looks ok. I'm not shure if it should be designed a bit more. For message 
preview, this one is ok.


There's another point to look at: help popups. I personally used DOM tooltips 
to provide help in another project. I think it would be a nice feature to 
provide help in IMP (and the rest of horde of course) if you point your mouse 
on a help-image with those DOM tooltips. A click on the image could then open 
the "old" help-window.
A help-icon could work in three modes: popupwindow, DOM tooltip and combined. 
The developer is then able to decide which mode would be the best.

I hope this helps you with your decision.

Gruss,
   Ollie.