Browser Tooltips Support

Several browsers support tooltips, which are small windows that pop down under the cursor when mouse is placed over certain elements in the document.

As of HTML 4, the generally accepted way of producing a tooltip is to put a title attribute in the element tag, with the text you want to be displayed in the tooltip.

It is unsurprising that there isn't much consensus among the producers of the several major browsers as to how tooltips and the title attribute should be implemented. Here, I've made a small study of the various behaviors in several of the browsers I have at my disposal.

Some browsers place the title attribute text in the status area of the browser window. MSIE produces tooltips with the alt attribute of some elements, so I also compared browser treatment of that element.

Tooltips are especially handy for annotating clickable maps. Since the advent of the acronym element, they have been used to display the meaning of acronyms. There is some disagreement over what the behavior of the title attribute should be for anchor (<a>) elements, whose URL has traditionally been displayed in the status area.

Tests

Map area

alt only alt of alt then title alt of title then alt

Acronym

no title
with title

Anchor

url only
url and title

MSIE 6

anchor elements
Only title attribute will bring a tooltip.
map area elements
Either alt or title attribute will bring a tooltip. In presence of both alt and title attributes, always prefers alt.
acronym elements
Text of title attribute displayed in tooltip.

Mozilla, Firefox, Netscape 6+

anchor elements
map area elements
Only title attribute will bring a tooltip. alt has no visible effect.
acronym elements
Element gets dotted underline; cursor changes to question mark; title attribute displayed in tooltip

Opera 6-8

In Opera 6, Tooltips can be turned on and off: Preferences-->General-->Accessibility. Can't seem to find this in Opera 8.

anchor elements
map area elements
Only title attribute will bring a tooltip. Text of title attribute also displayed in status area.
acronym elements
Text of title attribute displayed in tooltip and status area.

Amaya 8

no support for tooltips
And doesn't care for my experiments with alt and title, either.

iCab

No tooltips, per se.; title attributes are displayed in status area; cursor changes to exclamation mark.

anchor elements
Shows text of title attribute, with URL appended, in status area.

NS 4.x

No tooltips, alt and title attributes have no visible effect, acronym elements are ignored.

MSIE 4 Mac

anchor elements
Only title attribute will bring a tooltip.
map area elements
Neither alt nor title attribute brings a tooltip.
acronym elements
Text of title attribute displayed in tooltip