At this moment we can use CHtml::errorSummary($model); to print the summary of errors for this model.
I think that a better way is to put a permanent red tooltip near the the field that has an error to make the error message related the input field cleaner than now.
Another way is to put an error icon right near the input field and onOver show the tooltip with the error message related to that field.
What do you think about? I know that Yii want to leave the core code small but I think that these are some must-have-point for a good framework. Maybe I will do some extensions for this but before I want to know your opinions.
This can be implemented by extending CActiveRecord to provide such a method. And then all your other AR classes extend from this base class.
The reason that we don't want to include this into the core is because there could be other similar requests that would bloat the CActiveRecord class eventually.
Also, the tooltips are more suitable to be classified as presentational elements, which do not belong to model (label is special because we need it everywhere to name an attribute).
I agree, inputTooltips() is too application-specific. You may extend Yii yourself to allow for this functionality (as qiang said, I would extend CActiveRecord, and also CHtml)