Experimental jQuery Tooltips

Posted on August 25, 2009 by Ashley

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.