Tooltip

[mendhak]

In Internet Explorer, moving my mouse over an image (that has the ALT="something" specified), brings up a tooltip with the word "something" there.

Question 1: From what version of IE onwards was this feature present? Is it present in Opera?

Question 2: A toolbar I've created consists of about seven to eight images of size 16*16. This means I haven't written any words there. For example, an image of a question mark, and it's got the tooltip "help." Now I just checked it in Mozilla, and mozilla has no tooltip!! I'm assuming Netscape doesn't either? Any suggestions as to an alternative? How can I inform the (stupid) user that this question mark image is for "help"?

THanks.

[Rick Bull]

ALT isn't meant for tooltips (that's IE being naughty again ) - it's meant to be shown when the image isn't loaded, or the users doesn't have an image enabled browsers. You should instead use the title attribute which can be used on just about any element:

<img src="help.png" alt="Help" title="Takes you to the help page" />

IE also works with title so you should switch to that, although I think it doesn't use the title of a link if an image is within that, it instead uses the ALT so you have to add the title to the image as well.

[mendhak]

Thanks, that was good!

But you lost me here:

IE also works with title so you should switch to that, although I think it doesn't use the title of a link if an image is within that, it instead uses the ALT so you have to add the title to the image as well.

From what I understood, If I have an image link, in IE, I should use:

<a href="http://rickbull.co.uk/" alt="dummy" title="dummy">

Correct?

[Rick Bull]

Well sort of, but technically you would usually want to put the title in the link, because say you had this:

<a href="#"><img ... /> And some text by the side</a>

If you put the title in the img tag it would only show up when the cursor is over the image, and not the text by the side. So really you should be able to put a title for the link and not have to bother with the image. But because IE does the tool tip for the ALT text you have to add it for both the link and the image. Get me? But if it's just an image and no text then it doesn't matter

[mendhak]

It's frightening... I actually understood that

[Rick Bull]

Well done, you've become a man now my son.