[tooltip] Trigger does not work when rendering disabled elements

[BrandonGoren]

Bug report

Current behavior

Tooltips do not appear when the trigger is wrapped around a disabled button

Expected behavior

Tooltips should appear

It does not show because mouseOnly is true in FloatingUI's useHover and disabled elements do not fire mouse events. Pointer events do still fire, and setting mouseOnly to false or undefined will allow the tooltip to show up (this could also be intentional for accessibility reasons, but the behavior differs from Radix)

Reproducible example

https://stackblitz.com/edit/vitejs-vite-994xiqtx?file=src%2FApp.tsx

Base UI version

^1.0.0-beta.4

Which browser are you using?

Chrome

Which OS are you using?

Mac OS

Additional context

Provide any additional context that might help us identify the problem and find a solution.

[atomiks]

This pattern is generally not great anyway, because touch users can't see tooltips at all. A better solution is to use an "infotip" using Popover (<Popover.Root openOnHover>) with an icon next to the disabled button - then mouse, keyboard, and touch users can all see the popup simultaneously.

Still, this pattern has a workaround: avoid the disabled prop on the trigger, and use aria-disabled="true" instead (which also lets keyboard users see it — though touch users are still prevented), which lets mouse events continue to fire. onClick can be manually discarded by your code.

We could make this automatic with a focusableWhenDisabled prop, similar to the new Button component's behavior, but I think the first paragraph I wrote is an important consideration here

[battaglr]

@atomiks,

I haven’t had a chance to look at the focusableWhenDisabled implementation yet, but if it adds an aria-disabled="true" attribute and prevents pointer and keyboard events from firing, it seems like a reasonable fit here.

It’s important to keep in mind that not all UIs need to support touch devices, and in practice it’s not always possible to successfully advocate for patterns such as infotips or to change existing functionality (when migrating from Radix, for example). In those situations, having an accessible option that works for both pointer and keyboard would be great.

[andros-reflexai]

Facing same issue. Disabling the render child does not trigger the Tooltip.