Tooltip on:
[Wikipedia]
[Google]
[Amazon]
The tooltip, also known as infotip or hint, is a common 
On
The tooltip, also known as infotip or hint, is a common graphical user interface
The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, ins ...
(GUI) element in which, when hovering over a screen element or component, a text box displays information about that element, such as a description of a button's function, what an abbreviation stands for, or the exact absolute time stamp over a relative time ("… ago"). In common practice, the tooltip is displayed continuously as long as the user hovers over the element or the text box provided by the tool. It is sometimes possible for the mouse to hover within the text box provided to activate a nested tooltip, and this can continue to any depth, often with multiple text boxes overlapped.
On desktop, it is used in conjunction with a cursor, usually a pointer, whereby the tooltip appears when a user hovers the pointer over an item without clicking it.
On mobile operating system
A mobile operating system is an operating system for mobile phones, tablet computer, tablets, smartwatches, smartglasses, or other non-laptop personal computing, personal mobile computing devices. While computers such as typical laptops are "mobi ...
s, a tooltip is displayed upon long-pressing—i.e., tapping and holding—an element. Some smartphones have alternative input methods such as a stylus, which can show tooltips when hovering above the screen.
A common variant of tooltips, especially in older software, is displaying a description of the tool in a status bar. Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washi ...
's tooltips feature found in its end-user
In product development, an end user (sometimes end-user) is a person who ultimately uses or is intended to ultimately use a product. The end user stands in contrast to users who support or maintain the product, such as sysops, system administrato ...
documentation is named ScreenTips. Apple's tooltips feature found in its developer
Developer may refer to:
Computers
*Software developer, a person or organization who develop programs/applications
* Video game developer, a person or business involved in video game development, the process of designing and creating games
* Web de ...
documentation is named help tags. The classic Mac Operating System uses a tooltips feature, though in a slightly different way, known as balloon help. Some software and applications, such as GIMP
GIMP ( ; GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a free and open-source raster graphics editor used for image manipulation (retouching) and image editing, free-form drawing, transcoding between different image file formats, and more specialized ...
, 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.
Origin
The term ''tooltip'' originally came from older Microsoft applications (e.g. Microsoft Word 95). These applications would have toolbars wherein, when moving the mouse over the Toolbar icons, displayed a short description of the function of the tool in the toolbar. More recently, these tooltips are used in various parts of an interface, not only on toolbars.Examples
CSS
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone technolo ...
, HTML
The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaS ...
, and JavaScript
JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior, of ...
also other coding systems allow web designers to create customized tooltips.
Demonstrations of tooltip usage are prevalent on web pages. Many graphical web browser
A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used o ...
s display the title attribute of an HTML
The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaS ...
element as a tooltip when a user hovers the pointer over that element; in such a browser, when hovering over Wikipedia images and hyperlinks a tooltip will appear.
See also
*Mouseover
In computing, a mouseover, or hover box is a graphical control element that is activated when the user moves or hovers the pointer over a trigger area, usually with a mouse, but also possible with a digital pen. Mouseover control elements are c ...
* Hoverbox
*Infobox
An infobox is a digital or physical table used to collect and present a subset of information about its subject, such as a document. It is a structured document containing a set of attribute–value pairs, and in Wikipedia represents a summa ...
*Dialog box
The dialog box (also called dialogue box (non-U.S. English), message box or simply dialog) is a graphical control element in the form of a small window that communicates information to the user and prompts them for a response.
Dialog boxes ar ...
* Status bar
References