I recently had an idea for using the CSS pseudo-class :hover
to display a styled tooltip when the mouse is hovered over a link.
The basic code for the link looks like this:
.hasTooltip {
position:relative;
}
.hasTooltip span {
display:none;
}
.hasTooltip:hover span {
display:block;
background-color:black;
border-radius:5px;
color:white;
box-shadow:1px 1px 3px gray;
position:absolute;
padding:5px;
top:1.3em;
left:0px;
max-width:200px; /* I don't want the width to be too large... */
}
<a href="#" class="hasTooltip">This link has a tooltip!<span>This is the tooltip text!</span></a>
The result is exactly what I want, but with one annoying problem: the span does not expand to accommodate text, and if I don't specify a width, the text is squashed.
I did some searching on Google, found a couple examples of work people had done (this example is creepily similar to what I've gotten), but no one seems to have addressed the span
width problem I'm having.
I know this answer is extremely late, but it appears the key to your issue would be to use:
white-space: nowrap;
inside of your span, and get rid of any sort of width definition. Of course the drawback to this will be that the tooltip will only be able to support a single line. If you want a multiline solution you will most likely have to use javascript.
Here is an example of of this method: http://jsbin.com/oxamez/1/edit
An added bonus is that this works all the way down to IE7. If you do not need to support IE7, I would suggest folding the span, and img styles into a :before, and :after for the .tooltip. Then you can populate the text using the data-* attribute.