Posted by Toby A Inkster on 03/04/07 18:01

Eric Layman wrote:

> An image allows alt attribute. When mouse over images with alt attribute, a
> small yellow popup would appear besides the mouse cursor.

This is an MSIE-only "feature". The alt attribute is supposed to only be
displayed when the image cannot be displayed.

The correct attribute to use for such tooltips is title. Although title
doesn't *have* to be displayed as a tooltip, in practise, all current
mainstream browsers do -- including MSIE. (When both title and alt are
available, MSIE will show the title, not the alt!) Whatsmore, the title
attribute is available for pretty much every element -- not just images.

Examples:

<img src="/path/to/image.png"
alt="Text for when image is unavailable"
title="Tooltip text">


<a href="http://www.google.co.uk"
title="The Google Search Engine">Google</a>


<table title="Sales Figures for January 2007"
summary="Sales have increased ten-fold. Hurrah!">
<caption>Jan 2007</caption>
<!-- DATA GOES HERE -->
</table>

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me ~ http://tobyinkster.co.uk/contact
Geek of ~ HTML/SQL/Perl/PHP/Python*/Apache/Linux

* = I'm getting there!

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