The tooltip is a common graphical user interface element. It is used in conjunction with a cursor, usually a mouse pointer. The user hovers the cursor over an item, without clicking it, and a small "hover box" appears with supplementary information regarding the item being hovered over.
Variants
A common variant, especially in older software, is displaying a description of the tool in a
status bar, but such descriptions are not usually called tooltips. Another system, on the
Macintosh computer, that aims to solve the same problem, but in a slightly different way, is
balloon help. Another term for tooltip, used in
Microsoft end-user documentation, is “ScreenTip”.
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 mouse cursor 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, will also display the
alt attribute of an image as a tooltip in the same manner; if a
title attribute is also specified, it will override the
alt attribute for tooltip content, however.
See also
