Thursday, March 3, 2011

CSS3 Tooltip Trick using CSS3 :before psuedo element, content attribute and custom data attributes

I was looking for a way to make an HTMLElement's title appear faster in a WebKit application.

Turns out there is a way to capture the "title" attribute of an element using the :before pseudo element and content property, store that value in a div that only appears onhover over the original element. The problem with this technique was that the actual "title" attribute would eventually display.


Therefore, I made use of another CSS3 feature called "custom data attributes" and, rather than storing the title of the element in the "title" attribute, I used "data-title" instead.

Here is a quick example:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<head>
  <style type="text/css">
    .sprocket { position:relative;width:50px;height:50px;background-color:red; }
    .sprocket:before { content:attr(data-title); display:none; }
    .sprocket:hover::before{ width:160px; display:block; border-radius:3px; background-color:#fffdc7; padding:5px; color:black; margin-top:40px; margin-left:20px; -webkit-box-shadow: 3px 3px 3px rgba(193,193,193,.5);}
    .sprocket:hover{ z-index:10; position:absolute; }
  </style>
</head>
<body>
  <div class="sprocket" data-title="Fancy Title Text">
</body>
</html>
Click here for an Example

Shannon Norrell

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