`foot` style does not generate tooltip

[MLopez-Ibanez]

When using :cite: and the super style, hovering over the hyperlink generates a tooltip to preview the reference. This doesn't happen with :footcite:.

[mcmtroffaes]

Thanks for reporting. Is there a way to get tooltips with footnotes in docutils/sphinx? If so, it'd be easy to implement, but I'm not sure it is supported. I tried adding a "reftitle" attribute to the footnode reference nodes, with no success.

[MLopez-Ibanez]

So this seems a sphinx issue then.

[MLopez-Ibanez]

sphinx-doc/sphinx#3974 so it seems it is a docutils issue.

But judging from the replies here: sphinx-doc/sphinx#1762
it seems that they won't accept it and suggest to create a custom directive?

[mcmtroffaes]

My understanding is they said they won't support a generalized syntax for tooltips specifically in restructured text.

However, there's no reason it should not be supported from docutils... Unfortunately, only standard reference nodes have a reftitle attribute that's processed as a tooltip in html. Other reference nodes such as footnote references (or even citation references) seem to not have it as far as I can tell.

One solution would be to use custom nodes also for footnote citations (as suggested in the sphinx issue). But for now I prefer to keep the implementation simple and just rely on what sphinx is supporting. It's not entirely obvious to generate footnotes correctly and we can rely on docutils/sphinx to do all the tricky bits for us.

If sphinx/docutils grows reftitle support for footnotes (even without syntax, i.e. just for extensions to use), I'd certainly want to use it, but yes, it looks like that won't happen any time soon, unless I missed something.