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C’Mon In And Hover Me

So Nathan, better known as the dude who ripped the covers off Windows Mobile 7 AKA Photon recently, asked…

I love the hover comments you put on links! Is that a plugin, and where can I get it?

I’ve heard from folks before that they dig the hover comments too, which also appear on pictures as well. I thought it was a good qestion, and that other folks might be interested in the answer.

Firstly, there’s no plugin required.

Secondly, the actual text of the hover comments for both pictures and links come from the ol’ noggin of yours truly. So the text isn’t auto-generated. That level of wiseacre is 100% natural.

Thirdly, it’s a very simple bit of HTML code. For each link, I add a title attribute, which comprises the text of the hover comment. It only works that way because most browsers render the title attribute on mouseover as a hover.

Fourthly, BlogJet AKA The Parliamentary Funkadelic of Blogging Tools makes it dead simple to add the title attribute because, well…it’s right there in the box when adding a new link. Check it out…

Fifthly, for pictures it’s a bit different. Rather than using the title attribute, BlogJet embeds the alt attribute.

This makes a whole lot of sense, because alt specifies text that shows in place of actual graphics if the browser can’t or won’t support rendering them. If it does render the graphics, then the alt text hovers on mouseover the same way as the title attribute for links. Sexxay, huh?

Sixthly, here’s the actual HTML from a couple of examples in this very post. Here’s a link…

<a title=”Yo Nathan! This link’s for you, bud…” href=”http://microsoft.blognewschannel.com/archives/2008/01/06/exclusive-windows-mobile-7-to-focus-on-touch-and-motion-gestures/” target=”_blank”>

And here’s a pic…

 <img alt=”You really didn’t think I’d pass up an opportunity to include a hovercar pic, did you? Notice the superfuture with the hovercars, but the dude is still using paper? How quaint.” src=”http://www.chrisrue.com/funcave/graphics/jeanietakeamemo.png” border=”0″ />

Seventhly, some audio assist browsers and enhancements will actually read the title attribute aloud while rendering the page. Which rocks! And encourages me to become even more smart-aleck.

Eighthly, it seems to me that it would be even more helpful for the alt attribute to be read aloud. Well, maybe not my comments. I’m not sure they would adequately describe a graphic well enough to be of much help.

Ninthly, did I mention yet how I prolly wouldn’t have started doing this without the hypersonic assist from BlogJet?

|| posted by chris under freebie, opinion, rant, utility belt, wordpress || comments (1) || ||