Inside Technique : Interactive Tooltips
By Scott Isaacs

Tooltips are useful for providing additonal information or help. In this article we create interactive tooltips for Internet Explorer 4.0 or later. These tooltips can not only contain extra information, but can contain their own user-interface. You can use these tooltips to eliminate screen clutter by shortening long menus or to provide shortcuts to additionals options.

Our interactive tooltip demonstrates two techniques useful for anyone trying to script positioned elements. We show you how to position an element next to another element and how to intelligently use the mouse events to control when to hide and show elements. Below is a simple demonstration:

Next we are going to walk you through the techniques used in the script followed by demonstrations on how to effectively use the interactive tooltip. We will start by explaining how to position the tooltip.

© 1997-2000 InsideDHTML.com, LLC. All rights reserved.