New MenuItem have no tooltips anymore

[fabrice-aeschbacher]

Since v47.0, the old MenuItem from @siemens/element-ng/common is deprecated, in favour of the new version from @siemens/element-ng/menu. Problem: the new MenuItem has no tooltip anymore.

It can be argued that tooltips are not useful on a mobile device (*), but removing them also for Desktop is hard. Tooltips are very useful for embedding documentation: a MenuItem label is generally short (often one word, rarely two, never more). While the tooltip is generally a complete sentence aimed at detailing the short label.

(*) note that https://element.siemens.io/components/status-notifications/tooltip/ stil exist

[panch1739]

@fabrice-aeschbacher Thanks for the request! We had a quick chat with @kfenner where he explained a bit your use case.

I understand your point, but menu items are already self-explanatory through their visible text, like "Save" or "Copy," so a tooltip often just duplicates that information without adding anything useful. If an item needs explanation, the label is doing too little. The explanation belongs outside the menu: inline helper text, a details panel, an info icon next to the control that opens the menu, or documentation.

Refering to our own tooltip guidelines: Since tooltips are temporary, easy to miss and generally not accessible on touch devices, they should not contain critical or primary information and they should be use for supplementary, non-essential information only.

Yes, i know that some MS apps use it, but even Microsoft’s newer guidance generally avoids tooltips, unless there’s no alternative.

I totally understand that maybe your app is desktop only and is a stablished pattern within your ecosystem, so you could already implement them, using use the si-menu or si-menu-bar where you can add a tooltip manually to the children:

<si-menu>
  <si-menu-item siTooltip="Extra information" placement="end">Action</si-menu-item>
<si-menu>

Since the request conflicts with the Element tooltip general usage philosophy, we will not add the tooltip in the MenuItem.
Just as an FIY, we are currently working on an updated tooltip pattern #1245.

If you have a problem implementing the recommended solution, please let us know :)

/cc @spike-rabbit