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htmlruby-on-railsrubytooltipactivescaffold

How can I display simple tooltips on icons in html?


I am using ActiveScaffold in a Ruby on Rails app, and to save space in the table I have replaced the default "actions" text in the table (ie. "edit", "delete", "show") with icons using CSS. I have also added a couple of custom actions with action_link.add ("move" and "copy").

For clarity, I would like to have a tooltip pop up with the related action (ie. "edit", "copy") when I hover the mouse over the icon.

I thought I could do this by adding a simple "alt" definition to the tag, but that doesn't appear to work.

Can somebody point me in the right direction?


Solution

  • The alt attribute is to be used as an alternative to the image, in the case of the image missing, or in a text only browser.

    IE got it wrong, when they made alt appear as a tooltip. It was never meant to be that.

    The correct attribute for this is title, which of course doesn't do a tooltip in IE.

    So, to do have a tooltip show up in both IE, and FireFox/Safari/Chrome/Opera, use both an alt attribute and a title attribute.