Chapter 10. Working with Tooltips

Introduced as a part of the HTML 3 standard, and using the title attribute as its text, tooltips are a common element used to provide context within a page. You could find them in use in a variety of situations, although it is most likely that they will be found when providing assistance in correcting errors as part of the submission of a form (particularly when it concerns payment for products!).

The jQuery team introduced their version of the tooltip as part of changes to Version 1.9 of the library; it was designed to act as a direct replacement for the standard tooltip used in all browsers. The difference here, though, was that whilst you can't style the standard tooltip, jQuery UI's replacement is intended to be accessible, themeable, and completely customizable. It has been set to display not only when a control receives focus, but also when you hover over that control, which makes it easier to use for keyboard users.

In this chapter, we'll look at the...