avarab wrote:

And what would this title tag contain, for instance in the case of endash and minus?

ui2t5v002 wrote:

you would be able to hover over the endash and see a tooltip that said "en
dash", so you could differentiate it. :-)

avarab wrote:

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.

ui2t5v002 wrote:

(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.

robchur wrote:

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...

ui2t5v002 wrote:

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.

gangleri wrote:

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]]

Fileformat.info has a table which could be parsed easily:
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/a.htm

mjeske wrote:

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