Terminology: much disagreement?

["Geoff Hart" <geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca>]

Beth Kane observed <<I've gotten a lot of response to my previous 
post (thank you), but the answers are diverse! Here are the 
opinions so far about what to call a rectangular pop-up that appears 
when your mouse hovers over an element in a window:>>

This diversity suggests that there isn't any real consensus in the 
techwhirler community, and that you're better off going to your 
audience to find out their preferences. (That's generally the best 
approach, but not always feasible.) The goal is to pick a term that 
they're generally familiar with; for example, if your product is an add-
on to Microsoft Word, then you know for sure that they all use 
Word and you can use the same terminology that the Word docs 
use. Microsoft sometimes calls these popups "tool tips" (usually 
for icons), but in Word, they're called "ScreenTips" according to the 
View options dialog box. If you don't have any obvious way to figure 
out what terminology your audience prefers, then pick a term that 
seems obvious to you and use it consistently. What you call it is 
less important than the fact that you provide a way for them to 
understand your nomenclature, remember what it refers to (i.e., the 
ability to get help, which is more important than just memorizing 
jargon), and use that nomenclature to help them understand the 
software.

<<The people where I work have been calling it "fly-over help," 
which I thought was improper, thus prompting this thread.>>

That wouldn't be my first choice, since nothing and nobody is flying 
anywhere (unless your user interface is a flight simulator). I 
suspect they're thinking of "mouseovers", programmer jargon from 
(dynamic?) HTML and probably earlier technologies too. If you don't 
want to use "screentips" or invent your own terminology, you might 
be able to get away with simply calling it "onscreen help" or "popup 
help" in an initial "how to use this interface" section, and thereafter 
refer only to "help". In effect, you teach the users _only once_ the 
various ways they can get help, and thereafter don't specify which 
form of help they should select; once they've learned to use the 
help system, they can use whichever method best suits them and 
you don't need to keep prompting them by using some jargony 
term.

--Geoff Hart @8^{)}  geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca  (Pointe-Claire, Quebec)
"If you can't explain it to an 8-year-old, you don't understand it"--Albert Einstein