html select title

onmouseover title shows tooltip

[Alternative Future]

Hello to all,

Does anyone know how to create a tooltip when the mouse is over a select box? What I am trying to do is replicate the tooltip shown when the mouse hovers over any other html tag when using the title tag.
Our application is dependant on the user’s mouse being able to help and assist in them when filling out the forms. So when the user is viewing the form they can place their mouse cursor over any element and the title of that element is shown.
This fix would only have to work in IE.

Any help is appreciated.

TIA,

-Gs

[Sanenet]

Check out dynamicdrive.com, they have a number of innovative little help boxes you could use.

[Alternative Future]

Hi Sanenet,

Thanks for the super fast response, I am having a look through and found a few interesting scripts. My next questions is - is there a way to achieve this without or with very little JavaScript?

-Gs

[Sanenet]

Hmmm.... Well, we are talking about javascript triggering a specific response. So, no, it is all based on (standard) JS. Any particular reason for wanting to avoid JS if you're using a standard browser?

[Alternative Future]

Just being a little pedantic, we try to avoid having too much script running client side. And none is better as far as the project leader is concerned. I do realize that what we are after will require some scripting and having several options available for the demo would be nice. I will be pushing for the DHTML options as they are much nicer and have a better look and feel to them. But showing some of the less scripted ones is also nice.

-Gs

[Sanenet]

Stick it all in an include file, that way it gets cached on the client side. Speeds up downloading and processing time.

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

I suppose this is cheating but it can all be done in HTML, it is intuitive for the user and it works. What I have done in the past is stick a little image of a question mark beside each input box. You can place the tips in the alt text for the question mark images and the user can view them when they hover over the question mark.

[Sanenet]

Ohh, clever! Although with the DHTML solution you can alter and modify the colour and size of the tooltip.

Another quick & dirty way would just be to add OnMouseOver="window.status='message to display'" OnMouseOut="window.status=''" in the href to display your tip in the browser status bar.

[Alternative Future]

Cheers folks some nice solutions there...