Talk:Tooltip

Tooltip Timer
Hovering over a control elicits display of the tooltip text. However, the text disappears after a few seconds. Has the length of time the display is visible been defined? Can it be specified by the developer?--151.200.244.58 09:32, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

In Windows it is defined in system registry, and is not definable from one program to another. However certain programs (such as Tweak UI) can manipulate it as global system behaviour. yet another Matt 16:45, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Tooltip and Balloon help
What do you see as a difference between Tooltip and Ballon Help ? AlainD (talk) 22:49, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

ALT text
"With the release of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8, alt no longer displays a tooltip, and title is now used instead."

IE 8 still supports ATL as tooltip when TITLE is not present. Only when both are present, TITLE is used as tooltip instead of ALT.laoloup (talk) 01:05, 7 October 2009 (UTC)


 * This section is misleading, anyway. The HTML spec says nothing about whether alt= should be rendered a tooltip; the citation given is to a W3Schools page, which doesn’t even link to the spec, let alone quote anything from it.


 * I don’t have time to dig up references right now, but IE’s behavior goes back to version 4, maybe even earlier. Microsoft developers expressed the opinion that rendering alt= as a tooltip would encourage Web authors to provide the attribute. However, accessibility advocates observed that it was actually encouraging Web authors to provide alt= text that — in a screenreader or text-only browser — was often a non-sequitur. Mozilla developers debated which was more important — compatibility with IE, or encouraging good alt= text — and eventually chose the latter. The popularity of Firefox, and later Safari and Chrome, with no tooltips for alt=, gradually taught Web authors that if they wanted a tooltip they should use title= instead. Mpt (talk) 10:01, 27 October 2017 (UTC)

This article sucks
Sorry, but I think it sucks...there have to be *some* sources, right? It looks like some kind of uncommon technology that just came out and not many people know about it. This technology has been in existence for years and this is all we have? Why do we use the word tooltip in the summary? Isn't that a bit like defining a word by using itself? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.21.63.188 (talk) 22:47, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

Nice sweeping decision. If you're going to judge the entire article, base your decision on the article, not one detail that is generally ignored by the end user anyway. Also, a summary is not a definition, they aren't even synonyms. Furthermore, merely using the word does not make a circular definition, in fact try making one without the word; it's impossible.

PS: If you're going to complain, remember, you can edit the article too.

Marky1991 (talk) 21:45, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

OK, here's an example of why this article needs work: "The tooltip is used for providing an interface between pointer and push button generally." I'm not even close to sure what this means. It might be correct, but it's really unclear, so it's been removed. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.225.213.73 (talk) 03:33, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

Tooltip anatomy
Generally, a tooltip has five aspects:
 * tooltip target - HTML element to which a tooltip is attached,
 * target formatting - used to identify the presence of the tooltip
 * tooltip title or annotation - text to be displayed in the tooltip
 * tooltip skin - typically a shaded box containing the displayed annotation
 * tooltip placement - location of the tooltip, typically relative to the tooltip target

Integrated support for all five aspects is provided in the page notes approach to tooltips. Page Notes (talk) 23:28, 1 July 2013 (UTC)


 * Tooltips are not specific to HTML. The article shouldn't confuse specific implementations of tooltips with the general concept. — Steven G. Johnson (talk) 14:36, 26 September 2013 (UTC)

Origin?
I did a search with Factiva to find the oldest reference to this word in print. The first it came up with was a 1993 article (Brian Lee, "Productivity aid", The Straits Times, 15 December 1993):


 * Microsoft Word 6.0 has many new features and enhancements that should attract users of old versions to upgrade. [...] If you always have a hard time remembering the function of each icon on the toolbar, the new ToolTip system is great. You only need to leave the mouse pointing momen-tarily at an icon and a smal l informative ToolTip box would pop up below that icon. A slightly longer message would also appear at the status bar below your document.

It is not unambiguous from that 1993 article that "tooltip" was coined from the ToolTip feature of Word 6.0, but at least this provides an early citation. (In 1994 there were a whole slew of articles mentioning new ToolTip features in Microsoft and third-party applications that year.) A 1995 article (Vinod Anantharaman, "Windows 95 common controls: building blocks for GUI development," Dr. Dobb's Journal, 1 May 1995) also describes and defines "tooltip", indicating that the word is still relatively unfamiliar:


 * Only one class-specific style is associated with toolbar controls: TBSYTLE_TOOLTIPS. When you specify this style, the toolbar creates and manages a tooltip--a small pop- up window that contains a line of text describing a toolbar button; see Figure 2(b). The tooltip is displayed only when the user leaves the cursor on a toolbar button for approximately one second. it then appears near the cursor. 

Another 1995 article (Jeff Prosise, "Adding tooltips to your Win 95 apps," PC Magazine, 30 May 1995) confirms that generic support for tooltips was a new feature of Windows 95:


 * One of the new controls is the tooltip control, which allows developers to add Word- and Excel-style tooltips to their applications.

Hope this helps. — Steven G. Johnson (talk) 14:27, 26 September 2013 (UTC)

Examples section
It seems that the final sentence in the Examples section is incomplete. I don't know what the intention was, but maybe someone should finish the sentence or delete it.


 * 125.167.114.126 (talk) 00:44, 15 September 2020 (UTC)
 * 125.167.114.126 (talk) 00:44, 15 September 2020 (UTC)

ScreenTips
I would dispute the sentence "Microsoft's tooltips feature found in its end-user documentation is named ScreenTips". This is not true. The referenced article is only about some Word feature which seems to be called that way, but the sentence in the article suggests that Microsoft always calls them like that, which is not true. For this article, we could say that in some special use cases (Word feature) these Tooltips are called ScreenTips (if this should remain at all). --165.222.56.133 (talk) 15:24, 30 July 2021 (UTC)