It's always a joy to understand how things work. Well, at least I do. Alright, this time, I want to share with you all, how to create a simple jQuery tooltip. In this website, I'm using a script I grabed it online, and it uses onmouseover and onmouseout. It's really messy and annoying me. So, it's jQuery comes to rescue. The way it works is fairly simple, I use the Anchor tag REL and TITLE attributes to identify a tooltip and its content.
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Getting the mouse X and Y axis
First of all, I did a search with google, and I found this little script from this blog, very useful information. It shows me the idea how to retrieve the X and Y Axis coordinate.
$(document).ready(function()
{
$().mousemove(function(e)
{
$('p').html("X Axis : " + e.pageX + " | Y Axis " + e.pageY);
});
});
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Detect the Anchor element
I wrote a simple selector to select only Anchor tag with REL set to tooltip, I'm using the same approach in the Navigation List menu + jQuery Animate Effect tutorial. It's very straight forward and easy.
$('a[rel=tooltip]').mouseover(function() {
......
});
As a result, anchor tags that support this simple jQuery tooltip should look like this
<a rel="tooltip" title="Testing of tooltip">sentences</a>
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Trick to hide the TITLE Attribute's Tooltip in browser
Okay, there is one major issue we need to sort it out - The native tooltip in Mozilla browsers. If you're using TITLE attribute in Anchor tag, on mouse over, a small yellow tooltip will appear, we want to avoid that. So, a simple solution, on mouse over, we will grab the value in the TITLE attribute, then, remove its value. While on mouse out, we'll put it back on. : ) simple and easy. You'll able to see this in the final code.
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CSS
Finally, the CSS. I try to make the tooltip easy to reskin, you can customize the tooltip in this section. The structure of tooltip it made up with 3 sections - header, body and footer. It will be very easy for you to create your own skin.
#tooltip {
position:absolute;
z-index:9999;
color:#fff;
font-size:10px;
width:180px;
}
#tooltip .tipHeader {
height:8px;
background:url(images/tipHeader.gif) no-repeat;
}
/* IE hack */
*html #tooltip .tipHeader {margin-bottom:-6px;}
#tooltip .tipBody {
background-color:#000;
padding:5px 5px 5px 15px;
}
#tooltip .tipFooter {
height:8px;
background:url(images/tipFooter.gif) no-repeat;
}
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Final Product
Basically, that's it. Just combine al the techniques together, and you have just learned how to create a simple jQuery tooltip! You can look at the demo or download it and start playing with it.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>Simple JQuery Tooltips turtorial</title>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function() {
//Select all anchor tag with rel set to tooltip
$('a[rel=tooltip]').mouseover(function(e) {
//Grab the title attribute's value and assign it to a variable
var tip = $(this).attr('title');
//Remove the title attribute's to avoid the native tooltip from the browser
$(this).attr('title','');
//Append the tooltip template and its value
$(this).append('<div id="tooltip"><div class="tipHeader"></div><div class="tipBody">' + tip + '</div><div class="tipFooter"></div></div>');
//Set the X and Y axis of the tooltip
$('#tooltip').css('top', e.pageY + 10 );
$('#tooltip').css('left', e.pageX + 20 );
//Show the tooltip with faceIn effect
$('#tooltip').fadeIn('500');
$('#tooltip').fadeTo('10',0.8);
}).mousemove(function(e) {
//Keep changing the X and Y axis for the tooltip, thus, the tooltip move along with the mouse
$('#tooltip').css('top', e.pageY + 10 );
$('#tooltip').css('left', e.pageX + 20 );
}).mouseout(function() {
//Put back the title attribute's value
$(this).attr('title',$('.tipBody').html());
//Remove the appended tooltip template
$(this).children('div#tooltip').remove();
});
});
</script>
<style>
body {font-family:arial;font-size:12px;text-align:center;}
div#paragraph {width:300px;margin:0 auto;text-align:left}
a {color:#aaa;text-decoration:none;cursor:pointer;cursor:hand}
a:hover {color:#000;text-decoration:none;}
/* Tooltip */
#tooltip {
position:absolute;
z-index:9999;
color:#fff;
font-size:10px;
width:180px;
}
#tooltip .tipHeader {
height:8px;
background:url(images/tipHeader.gif) no-repeat;
}
/* IE hack */
*html #tooltip .tipHeader {margin-bottom:-6px;}
#tooltip .tipBody {
background-color:#000;
padding:5px;
}
#tooltip .tipFooter {
height:8px;
background:url(images/tipFooter.gif) no-repeat;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div id="paragraph">
A paragraph typically consists of a unifying main point, thought, or idea accompanied by supporting details. The non-fiction paragraph usually begins with the general and moves towards the more specific so as to advance an argument or point of view. Each <a rel="tooltip" title="A paragraph typically consists of a unifying main point, thought, or idea accompanied by <b>supporting details</b>">paragraph</a> builds on what came before and lays the ground for what comes next. Paragraphs generally range three to seven sentences all combined in a single paragraphed statement. In prose fiction successive details, for example; but it is just as common for the point of a prose paragraph to occur in the middle or the end. A paragraph can be as short as one word or run the length of multiple pages, and may consist of one or many <a rel="tooltip" title="Testing of Sentences">sentences</a>. When dialogue is being quoted in fiction, a new paragraph is used each time the person being quoted changed.
</div>
</body>
</html>
Comments will be moderated and
rel="nofollow"will be added to all links. You can wrap your coding with[code][/code]to make use of built-in syntax highlighter.Once again...Thank you so much.
im not good with JavaScript
but i thine if the tool-tip can fetch it's content from external .html page it will be more useful
some thing like that >> http://www.javascriptkit.com/script/script2/ajaxtooltip.shtml
i hope u replay for this
thnx
but how can i change the function, to set more "anchors" to have a tooltip? e.g. [title] oder a.externallink and so on?
<a href="xxx" rel="right">Float right</a>
You need to make the script to grab REL, then pass it to a ifelse statement for different position value.
//Set the X and Y axis of the tooltip
$('#tooltip').css('top', e.pageY + 10 );
$('#tooltip').css('left', e.pageX + 20 );
which picks up any links with title tags. I also got over the limitation to hyperlinks e.g. to set a tooltip on an image or whatever using <a href="#"><img src="test.png" /></a>
However, whilst the script runs OK it does seem to run intermitently for me, some tooltips some up as undefined, then you refresh the page and they work, it seems a random bug. Has anyone else seen this behaviour, maybe something to do with the script being processed too fast?
var tip;
switch($(this).attr('id'))
{
case 'dts':
tip = "<strong>Date</strong><br />Specifies a date to search on. It automatically sets itself to today's date."
break;
case 'tms':
tip = "<strong>Start & End Time</strong><br />If you wish to see only a portion of a day, select the parameters which meet your criteria.<br />"
+ "If it is left blank, it will search thorugh the entire day."
break;
case 'therows':
tip = "<strong>Rows Per Page</strong><br />Specifies the number of rows returned per page. The user can navigate between pages to view all results.<br />"
+ "If left blank, it will show all results.";
break;
}