Show HN: hint.css – a tooltip library in CSS | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: hint.css – a tooltip library in CSS

kushagragour.in

236 pointschinchang55 comments

For reference: Doesn't work on Internet Explorer 7, always shows the hints on Internet Explorer 8 and works fine on Internet Explorer 9 (Minus the animations.)

very cool, use of css3 attr function. allowing the rule:

content: attr(data-hint);

see: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/CSS/attr

I didn't know that was possible. has got my mind reeling with what I can now do with CSS. Thanks OP for making this.

Here's full range of what's possible with the CSS content Property in case you're interested: http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/pr_gen_content.asp

What's wrong with title="my took tip" and let th browser do it? For browsers that don't its a single line of jQuery.

Because the browser may render the tool tip slower than you'd like. Plus, it may be too generic a look for bespoke sites.

Unfortunately `title` implementations are broken for pretty much everybody except mouse users on desktop:

http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2013/01/using-the-html-tit...

it's just stylizing. What CSS does in general.

It'd be interesting if you could just apply CSS to title attributes rather than have to add stuff to the DOM to reimplement a basic browser feature. Certainly these types of tooltip libraries look and behave better, but I wonder if it's really the best solution.

Legit CSS for tooltip and scrolling bars will arrive some day. I hope.

The time spent hovering for the built in title attribute to be displayed is so long that most users will never see/notice the tooltip.

Nice, but it's broken on lesser browsers

http://s3.postimage.org/8d3zodcur/Screen_Shot_2013_02_04_at_...

Glad you guyz liked it and thought it to be useful :)

do you think you can adapt it to display an entire <span> ? That's very neat, but just single string text is not enough for me!

You mean you want to show HTML inside the tooltip?

yes indeed, especially to allow multiline. (but maybe that's not your original intend ... ?)

It's wouldn't be possible if you're only using CSS. See this stackoverflow post [1], or more specifically the spec it references [2] on the CSS content property (used by this library).

The acceptable values are:

    normal | none | [ string | uri | counter | attr(identifier) | open-quote | close-quote | no-open-quote | no-close-quote ]+ | inherit

You might think, maybe you could insert html by putting the html on an attribute and using the attr() value, but reading further:

This function returns as a string the value of attribute X for the subject of the selector. The string is not parsed by the CSS processor.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4505093/css-content-prope...

[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/generate.html#propdef-content

too bad ... I guess it means we're stuck with JS to display multiline and/or format tooltips ...

for the time being, yes.

Neat idea, and seems to work well.

On the other hand, having to include two classes seems sloppy. Why not just roll the core styles into the position classes, or include a default position in the 'hint' class?

Double dashes in class names are also annoying.

Thanks. I thought of putting the core into the position classes but that seemed to duplicate some styles in the generated CSS. Though having a default position surely seems a nice idea. Will work on it :)

Finally we can get rid of Tipsy.js http://onehackoranother.com/projects/jquery/tipsy/

Is there something wrong with tipsy.js?

I just took a quick look at it, and it seems like a nice tooltip library.

Well, Tipsy, bootstrap tooltips and similar javascript based tooltips require you to initialize them.

It's fine if you have a mostly static page, so you can initialize all fo them on domready.

But if you are in a very dynamic page with pjax or a Javascript MVC app, you always have to initialize them again on any page change.

It's costly and error prone. This pure CSS solution in the other hand do not require any initialization. You put the HTML with the proper classes and it will just works.

I really like it, but part of me thinks the better way would be to just use whatever's on the title attribute of an element, which would of course need JavaScript. I guess this would be better for lighter sites.

Edit- I misunderstood how this works, I thought you actually had to add <span>s (extra markup) but it seems not! This is really great!

My only complaint is that it messes with elements if you're doing the :before/after thing for font icons.

Thanks Andrex. The issue with using title attribute is that its hard to suppress the default tooltip that shows up with just CSS. Any idea if it can be done?

Not without JS as far as I know, which is unfortunate. It really should be some kind of CSS attribute.

Nice job.

I created something extremely similar a few months back for my day job (wow the traffic I missed out on!).

One thing I've encountered in this and in my own implementation: the hint gets blocked by iframe if it's nearby. Has anyone figured out a way to reliably have it appear over the iframe instead of under? I've been struggling with it for a while and have not figured it out.

Thanks. I'll have to check this iframe thing though the z-index should take care I guess.

Awesome!! (But the double hyphen in 'hint--top' or 'hint--left' is a bit cheesy...)

Also liked it - and agree, double hyphen is mega ewww.

The double hyphen is actually part of a pretty common naming convention (BEM-style) for distinguishing between separate components, component modifiers, and component sub-objects.

Examples: https://gist.github.com/1309546 http://nicolasgallagher.com/about-html-semantics-front-end-a... http://csswizardry.com/2013/01/mindbemding-getting-your-head... http://engineering.appfolio.com/2012/11/16/css-architecture

Good job with the citations

The one downside to any library that uses before/after pseudo elements is that they take over the pseudo elements and can no longer be used for other purposes.

I would say that they should only be used for styling and not functionality.

Very clever. FWIW There are some issues when the node is near the edge of the window. The browser will display the contents of a title attribute atop the browser chrome, but your tooltip will be hidden.

one caveat, any approach like this (one that just uses css) will hide the tooltip if the thing it is tipping (or one of it's parents) is clipped by overflow:auto/scroll/hidden. the only way to get around that is using javascript (the tooltip needs to be inserted into the dom outside of the element with constrained overflow, eg: as a child of body). I've found that in any decent size project I've done, eventually I run into that scenario, so I usually just start with a JS based approach from the beginning (bootstrap, jqueryUI, etc)

I was going to say the exact same thing, but you beat me too it!

I started with this approach when I built our tooltip library for my company, but eventually there were just too many gotchas. We switched to using JavaScript and inserting the generated element as a child of `body`.

Just thinking aloud here. Could that problem be avoided by putting the tooltip element outside of the thing it is tipping, and then using a CSS selector like ".tipped-element:hover + .tooltip-element"?

I'm sure there are some other caveats that would reveal themselves later even if this one is avoidable...

Cool, I had a similar go a while back http://jsfiddle.net/i_like_robots/qrXyE/

More CSS Tooltips - http://cssdeck.com/search/?q=tooltip (just sharing)

Only one submission on the page you linked to was actually a comparable tool tip.

brilliant... i always hated adding weirdo js for such standard tasks, polluting the content with meta-code/meta-content ugliness!

I wish it would position itself so that it was always on the screen, e.g. scroll so the top-toolip is off the screen.

Do you have a browser compatibility list?

I'll prepare a compatibility sheet and put up soon on the project page. Meanwhile if anyone wants to take this up, please go ahead.

Cool, I am a fan of this ever since I this on codepen. Really awesome stuff.

can we keep the tip active on hover of the tip? lets say the text was long and I wanted to traverse the text with my mouse pointer, can I have that?

just the tip!

Awesome work Kush! Looking forward to using it! :)

The animations work for me in Chrome dev (26).

Now is foundation/bootstrap going to use it?

Great work Kushagra. Very useful stuff.

Well implemented. Thanks for sharing!

Truly a great tool, thanks for this!

Really nice - will use this.

I'm a fan.

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