Tooltip
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The tooltip or infotip is a common graphical user interface element. It is used in conjunction with a cursor, usually a pointer. The user hovers the pointer over an item, without clicking it, and a tooltip may appear—a small "hover box" with information about the item being hovered over.[1]
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[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.[citation needed] 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.[citation needed]
[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 pointer 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 (prior to version 7), will also display the alt attribute of an image as a tooltip in the same manner if an alt attribute is specified and a title attribute is not. If a title attribute is also specified, it will override the alt attribute for tooltip content.[citation needed]
[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 in various parts of an interface, not only on toolbars.
[edit] Hiding tooltips
Some software and applications, such as The GIMP, provide an option for users to turn off some or all tooltips. However, such options are left to the discretion of the developer, and are often not implemented.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
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