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The tooltip is a common graphical user interface
Graphical user interface

A graphical user interface is a type of user interface which allows people to human-computer interaction such as computers; hand-held devices such as MP3 Players, Portable Media Players or Gaming devices; household appliances and office equipment....
 element. It is used in conjunction with a cursor
Cursor (computers)

In computing, a cursor is an indicator used to show the position on a computer monitor or other display device that will respond to input from a text input or pointing device....
, 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.

mmon variant, especially in older software, is displaying a description of the tool in a status bar
Status bar

A status bar, similar to a status line, is an information area typically found at the bottom of Window s in a graphical user interface.A status bar is sometimes divided into sections, each of which shows different information....
, but such descriptions are not usually called tooltips.






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The tooltip is a common graphical user interface
Graphical user interface

A graphical user interface is a type of user interface which allows people to human-computer interaction such as computers; hand-held devices such as MP3 Players, Portable Media Players or Gaming devices; household appliances and office equipment....
 element. It is used in conjunction with a cursor
Cursor (computers)

In computing, a cursor is an indicator used to show the position on a computer monitor or other display device that will respond to input from a text input or pointing device....
, 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
Status bar

A status bar, similar to a status line, is an information area typically found at the bottom of Window s in a graphical user interface.A status bar is sometimes divided into sections, each of which shows different information....
, but such descriptions are not usually called tooltips. Another system, on the Macintosh
Macintosh

File:Imac alu.pngMacintosh, commonly shortened to Mac, is a brand name which covers several lines of personal computers designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc....
 computer, that aims to solve the same problem, but in a slightly different way, is balloon help
Balloon help

Balloon help was a help system introduced by Apple Computer in their 1991 release of System 7 . The name referred to the way the help text was displayed, in "speech balloon", like those containing the words in a comic strip....
. Another term for tooltip, used in Microsoft
Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is a multinational corporation computer technology corporation that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of computer software products for computing devices....
 end-user documentation, is “ScreenTip”.

Examples

Demonstrations of tooltip usage are prevalent on Web pages. Many graphical Web browser
Web browser

A Web browser is a application software which enables a user to display and interact with text, images, videos, music, games and other information typically located on a Web page at a website on the World Wide Web or a local area network....
s display the title attribute of an HTML
HTML

HTML, an Acronym and initialism of HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for Web pages. It provides a means to describe the structure of text-based information in a document?by denoting certain text as links, headings, paragraphs, lists, and so on?and to supplement that text with interactive forms, embedded '...
 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
Internet Explorer

Windows Internet Explorer , commonly abbreviated to IE, is a series of graphical user interface web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems starting in 1995....
, 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

  • Toolbar
    Toolbar

    In a graphical user interface on a computer monitor a toolbar is a panel on which onscreen buttons, icons, menus or other input or output elements are placed....
  • Mouseover
    Mouseover

    A Mouseover or hover box refers to a GUI Event-driven programming that is raised when the user moves or "hovers" the cursor over a particular area of the GUI....
External links

  • - explains how to add tooltips to MediaWiki
    MediaWiki

    MediaWiki is a World Wide Web wiki software application used by all projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, all wikis hosted by Wikia, and many other wikis, including some of the largest and most popular ones....
     using JavaScript
    JavaScript

    JavaScript is a scripting language widely used for client-side web development. It was the originating Programming language dialect of the ECMAScript standard....
    .