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A web browser tooltip displayed for a hyperlink.

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 tooltip may appear — a small "hover box" with information about the item being hovered over.

[edit] 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 old Mac OS versions, 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. The tooltip is used for providing an interface between pointer and push button generally.

[edit] 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.

With the release of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8, alt no longer displays a tooltip, and title is now used instead. When title is not present, alt is still used to display the tooltip.

[edit] 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.^{[citation needed]} More recently, these Tooltips are used everywhere, not only on Toolbars.

[edit] See also

• Toolbar
• Mouseover