I had seen this before: I am on a webpage, I position the mouse over a hyperlink but I don't click. If I hover long enough, a tooltip pops up giving a description of that link's target. (I would put a screenshot here but no images seem to upstream to the cloud, sorry :)

So today I was admiring the photos on photomatt.net. I jumped to his faq page which listed this poignant inquiry: does his website have any hidden tricks? His reply:

"Tons of them! There are a lot of hidden subtleties you might pick up, like the alt tag on some of the pictures or the title tag on some links. Let your mouse linger!"

And it clicked (ok, think of a better word for clicked, to mean epiphany, sudden clarity). The HTML Link tags (<A HREF="www.scripting.com>Scripting</A>) supports a title attribute. The title attribute value, it turns out, is the text that appears in the tooltip. Very cool!

Before, no tooltip:

<A HREF="http://radio.weblogs.com/0111198/">Blogfish</A>

After, with tooltip:

<A HREF="http://radio.weblogs.com/0111198/" title= "Knowledge Repository. Idea outlet.">Blogfish</A>

2:23:44 PM  comment [] | Categories: 80-20 Web Development|