Tooltip

The tooltip or infotip or a hint is a common graphical user interface element. It is used in conjunction with a cursor, usually a pointer. The user hovers the pointer over an item, without clicking it, and a tooltip may appear—a small "hover box" with information about the item being hovered over.^[1]^[2] Tooltips do not usually appear on mobile operating systems, because there is no cursor (though tooltips may be displayed when using a mouse).

Variants

A common variant, especially in older software, is displaying a description of the tool in a status bar. Another system, in the classic Mac OS, that aims to solve the same problem, but in a slightly different way, is balloon help. Microsoft invented another term, "ScreenTip", and uses it in its end-user documentation.

Examples

Demonstrations of tooltip usage are prevalent on web pages. Many graphical web browsers display the title attribute of an HTML element as a tooltip when a user hovers the pointer over that element; in such a browser you should be able to hover over Wikipedia images and hyperlinks and see a tooltip appear. Some browsers, notably Microsoft's Internet Explorer (prior to version 7), will also display the alt attribute of an image as a tooltip in the same manner if an alt attribute is specified and a title attribute is not. This is an incorrect behaviour of the alt attribute according to the W3C specification.^[3] If a title attribute is also specified, it will override the alt attribute for tooltip content.

CSS, HTML, and JavaScript allow web designers to create customized tooltip.

Name

The term tooltip originally came from older Microsoft applications (like Microsoft Word 95), which had a toolbar where moving the mouse over the buttons (the Toolbar icons) displayed these tooltips, a short description of the function of the tool in the toolbar. More recently, these tooltips are used in various parts of an interface, not only on toolbars.

Hiding tooltips

Some software and applications, such as GIMP, provide an option for users to turn off some or all tooltips. However, such options are left to the discretion of the developer, and are often not implemented.

References

↑ "Tooltip Definition". TechTerms.com. Retrieved 13 May 2014.
↑ Microsoft website of tooltip
↑ "HTML img alt Attribute". W3Schools. Retrieved 6 September 2014.

Widgets (List of …)
Command input	Adjustment handle Button Context menu Drop-down list Hamburger button Menu Pie menu
Data input-output	Checkbox Color picker Combo box Cycle button Date Picker Grid view List box List builder Radio button Scrollbar Search box Slider Spinner Text box
Informational	Balloon help Head-up display in computing Head-up display in video games Icon Infobar Label Loading screen Progress indicator Progress bar Splash screen Throbber Sidebar Status bar Toast Tooltip
Containers	Accordion Disclosure widget Frame/Fieldset Menu bar Panel Popover Ribbon Tab Toolbar Window Workspace
Navigational	Address bar Breadcrumb Hyperlink Navigation bar Pager Tree view
Special windows	Alert dialog box Dialog box File dialog Inspector window Modal window Palette window
Related concepts	File viewer List of graphical user interface elements Layout manager Look and feel Mouseover Widget toolkit WIMP

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