Template talk:Glossary link

Latest comment: 10 years ago by SMcCandlish in topic Dotted border

Dotted border edit

Would anyone object to me removing the weird dotted border? Kaldari (talk) 09:10, 27 December 2011 (UTC)Reply

Agreed. The dotted underline and its accompanying tooltip are rendered obsolete by the link which serves its own tooltip, and having both is confusing and counter-intuitive. Moreover, a tooltip should only be used to expand on the meaning of the underlined term (e.g., {{circa}} produces c., where the tooltip explains that "c." stands for "circa"), but most uses of this template simply repeat the underlined term (or a modified version of it) in the tooltip (e.g., "corner pockets" has a tooltip reading "corner pocket"), which is unhelpful and redundant. Can someone remove the tooltip? sroc 💬 11:28, 8 December 2013 (UTC)Reply
Following discussion at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#Dotted underline, I have removed the tooltip (and the dotted-underline went with it) and updated the documentation accordingly. The current state is still not ideal, as the {{glossary link internal}} template uses black text for a link, which is not a great solution to the "sea of blue". Hopefully someone with a better knowledge of the templates can do a better job at fixing this, but please do not reinstate duelling tooltips! sroc 💬 11:40, 8 December 2013 (UTC)Reply
This unilateral clobbering of over half the code in this and the related {{Glossary link internal}} severely broke the functionality of the glossary template system. Within glossaries, it now makes a bunch of links that no one knows exist unless they by blind chance happen to hover over one of them. This has badly affected the usability of, e.g. Glossary of cue sports terms. There was never any intent to have two tooltips; resolving that problem cannot be rationally tied to making all links created by this template invisible. The intent, however, is absolutely not that they be rendered like regular links when used within the same document, or it does in fact generate a massive sea of blue. I'll think on this and see what I can come up with. The dotted underline was chosen because it is very widely used all over the Web for precisely this sort of purpose, the providing of a definition or other in-band content relating to a term, tag or other bit of highlighted text.
Nothing at the "discussion" at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 149#Dotted_underline suggests anything like a consensus to disable this formatting, nor was any alterantive suggested; the entire thread consists of one person asking about it, someone else talking about double tool tips, and a third editor talking to himself about his attempts to resolved the latter issue.  — SMcCandlish ¢ ⚞(Ʌⱷ҅̆⚲͜^)≼  15:49, 24 March 2014 (UTC)Reply