Hi David
I struggled with this as well. I tried the nicetitles javascript which allows 
you to put the information in the title tag and firefox will show the entire 
text. It also gives you the ability to style the "tooltip" window that pops up. 
We decided against it for our particular use. We have a form teaser on the left 
and some in the body of the page. The nicetitles window pops up relative to 
where the mouse is on the label tag. This forced me to put some extra distance 
in the nicetitle and it became too confusing.  However, if you have a form that 
is only shown in the main section and can control the layout better, you may 
want to try this technique. 
http://www.kryogenix.org/code/browser/nicetitle/

Do some searching around for nice titles and take a look at how others have 
modified the script. It has some great potential and is less intrusive than 
popup windows. I think Safari continues to show the tool tip in the status bar.

You could also do the javascript function to hide/show the information. This 
will hide the information for those with javascript disabled. This is something 
to consider.

Good luck
Ted
http://www.tdrake.net


-----Original Message-----
From: david [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, January 13, 2005 4:50 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [WSG] Popups


Here's the situation:

I've got a form that users fill out in order to add something to a database...

Under each <dt>, there's the <label for=""> element for each of the input 
elements, and that works fine

But because of the layout of the page, the <label> values are kept short, 
yes... there are title="" attributes, but IE and FF don't show the whole text

So I was thinking about doing what other sites do... and thats to put a "more 
info on this field" link, people click on it, and a popup appears with the 
minimum of browser UI chrome and jumps to the right section in the code

Ordinarily, this would be achieved with the help of JavaScript and 
Window.Open(), so much for cross-browser compatibility.

Then there's the target="_blank" anchor attribute, but this is disallowed by 
the DTD I'm using (XHTML1.1 w/ IFrame), that... plus it doesn't offer a way to 
get rid of browser UI elements.

Does anyone have any alternatives?

I was thinking of having a JavaScript "show/hide" function with the 
instructions and extra detail contained in a <div style="visibility: 
none;"></div>
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