Experimental jQuery Tooltips

25 August 2009| 12 Comments| Print

I’ve never written a jQuery tooltip script before so i thought i’d give it a go and write my own. Its very much in the experimental stage but i thought i’d open it up to see what the community has to say about it. I had the most trouble with the ajax tooltip and getting the content to display in the tip. I know there are plenty of jQuery tooltip scripts out there but i really wanted to see how they were made, and the best way to find out is to build one for your self.

So here’s the JS

$(document).ready(function(){

$('[rel=tooltip]').bind('mouseover', function(){

 if ($(this).hasClass('ajax')) {
	var ajax = $(this).attr('ajax');	

  $.get(ajax,
  function(theMessage){
$('<div class="tooltip">'  + theMessage + '</div>').appendTo('body').fadeIn('fast');});

}else{

var theMessage = $(this).attr('content');
	    $('<div class="tooltip">' + theMessage + '</div>').appendTo('body').fadeIn('fast');
		}

		$(this).bind('mousemove', function(e){
			$('div.tooltip').css({
				'top': e.pageY - ($('div.tooltip').height() / 2) - 5,
				'left': e.pageX + 15
			});
		});
	}).bind('mouseout', function(){
		$('div.tooltip').fadeOut('fast', function(){
			$(this).remove();
		});
	});
   });

The HTML

The following combination of attributes can be added to any link to create a tooltip.

rel=”tooltip” | this enables the link as a tooltip without this no tooltip would be show for that specific link
class=”ajax” | if you want to call another page using ajax into the tooltip you need to add this class aswell as add the attribute ‘ajax’ with the link to the page you want to call
ajax=”AJAX_URL_HERE” | this is where you specify the link to the page that you want to pull in using ajax.
content=”Tooltip content” | this is where you put your main tooltip text including any image using regular html

<li><a href="#" alt="Text Tooltip" rel="tooltip" content="<span>Text Title</span><br/> This is an example of a text tooltip with jquery">Text Tooltip</a></li>

<li><a href="#" alt="Image Tooltip" rel="tooltip" content="<span>Image Title</span><br/> <img src='http://papermashup.com/demos/jquery-gallery/images/t2.png' width='120' height='120' class='tooltip-image'/> This is an example of an image tooltip with jquery, with a little bit of text.<br/> Remember you can follow me on twitter just search: ashleyford">Image Tooltip</a></li>

<li><a href="#" alt="Image Tooltip" rel="tooltip" content="<span>Iframe Tooltip</span><br/> <iframe src='http://google.com' width='250px' height='100px' frameborder='0' scrolling='0'></iframe>">Iframe Tooltip</a></li>

<li><a href="#" class="ajax" alt="Image Tooltip" rel="tooltip" ajax="ajax.php?id=1823472">Ajax Tooltip</a></li>

I’m posting this purely as an experiment, and this code hasn’t been tested in all browsers so is very much in the alpha stage. I’d love to hear your feedback on what or how you would do it.

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12 Comments

Balaji

Wow, I hadn’t thought about it that way before. Good write up, very clearly written. Have you written previously about Experimental jQuery Tooltips? I’d love to read more.

26 August 2009 at 9:54 pm

Balaji

Very nice! I’ve been wondering aboutJquery lately. Do you have any thoughts about Drop and down using Jquery

26 August 2009 at 11:19 pm

CSS Brigit | Experimental jQuery Tooltips

Experimental jQuery Tooltips…

I've never written a jQuery tooltip script before so i thought i'd give it a go and write my own. Its very much in the experimental stage but i thought i'd open it up to see what the community has to say about it.

…

27 August 2009 at 9:09 am

Jake

I was thinking if this will gonna work for comments but i think it will but have a lots of code.

Example: the name of the commentor will only display like a list and the body of comment will show if you point it using this tooltip.

30 August 2009 at 8:55 am

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[...] Experimental jQuery Tooltips [...]

1 September 2009 at 1:41 pm

Tutorial City

It seems that the last tooltip doesn’t appear on the right spot on mouseenter, just on mousemove.
Very cool tutorial

2 September 2009 at 10:03 pm

Matt

The mousemove function, which controls the position of the tooltip, isn’t bound until mouseover fires. The result is if the user moves his mouse slowly or lands on the wrong spot the tooltip will appear at the bottom of the page until he moves his mouse again.

I altered your code by styling the div to “display:none” inside of mouseover and then changing it to “display:block” inside of mousemove. Now it works like a champ.

10 September 2009 at 6:44 pm

Ashley

@Matt thanks for that! i’ll be sure to update the code with your modification

11 September 2009 at 1:04 pm

Joe

Nice script, I used on my site and it works well – only issue is it doesnt validate because of the content attribute – any workarounds for that?

24 September 2009 at 2:43 pm

Ashley

@joe good to hear you found it useful, you could always use ‘name’ instead of content or ‘title’

24 September 2009 at 4:50 pm

Rafa

@joe You could use the [rel^='tooltip'] selector to make it work and have a link like this:
<a href="#" alt="Text Tooltip" rel="tooltip Text Title This is an example of a text tooltip with jquery">Text Tooltip

Then you can remove the “tooltip” part and voila! Successful validation, but i don’t know if it would be a huge impact on performance

2 October 2009 at 12:13 pm

Christian

To mask the tooltip with its creation

To add to the class
.tooltip{
visibility:hidden;
}

To add to the script
$(this).bind(‘mousemove’, function(e){
$(‘div.tooltip’).css({
‘top’ : e.pageY – ($(‘div.tooltip’).height() / 2) – 5,
‘left’: e.pageX + 15
})
.css(‘visibility’, ‘visible’);

});

Thank you for this excellent work
Christian

15 November 2009 at 3:53 pm