Designing with Progressive Enhancement: Building the Web that Works for Everyone
by Todd Parker, Patty Toland, Scott Jehl, Maggie Costello Wachs
Chapter Ten. Tooltips
Tooltips are used to present content “on demand” in an interface—typically, secondary content like a simple text description for an icon button, detail for a data point on a chart, or helpful field-level instruction in a form—so that users can gain greater context without having to interrupt what they’re reading or doing. Tooltip content generally displays as a small overlay that appears when the user places their cursor over an element.
Most browsers include a standard tooltip feature by default: any content in a title attribute assigned to an HTML tag will render as a tooltip when the user hovers the cursor over an element for about a second. However, these standard browser tooltips have a fixed appearance (usually a ...
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