Post

Native customizable tooltips are something I've been begging for!

What kind of elements do you most often need a tooltip for? Trying to understand whether tooltips are most often use on focusable elements or not.

I've received a lot of responses and had really good discussions on this topic. I also did some additional research of my own. Still thinking about it, but will share back soon.

Thanks, you all, for your responses. I’ve had time to think more about this, read up more on the topic, and did some research. The result ➡️ Opening the can of tooltips, a blog post on our proposal to implement fully accessible and customizable built-in tooltips on the web.

I guess this would be nice for simple cases, but title tooltips have a too long hover delay, can’t be programmatically shown, and don’t support [non-interactive] HTML. So for most implementations, I’m still reaching for a component.

On which elements do you most often need a tooltip? I'm doing some more research on the topic.

Most common case is probably icon buttons, as it gives users desktop more confidence in what they're about to click. My biggest gripe about title is a) style and b) show delay. Programmatic use cases and non-interactive HTML content can probably be handled fine with a popover, bth.

I’d settle for user-agent styles that didn’t look like they were from 1997! But yea, would be great to style tooltips/titles so they look integrated 🙇‍♂️

What kind of elements do you most often need a tooltip for? Trying to understand whether tooltips are most often use on focusable elements or not.

Yes, being able to style that way would be fantastic. Very in for less html and not needing to deal with positioning & accessibility work of rolling my own.

What kind of elements do you most often need a tooltip for? Trying to understand whether tooltips are most often use on focusable elements or not.

god, it would fix so many WCAG issues

And create a thousand more? 😁

Was just thinking how its usage would skyrocket if it becomes styleable.

In my opinion a delay control would be higher in priority. And a way to trigger it through JS… Styling would just be cherry on the cake.

What kind of elements do you most often need a tooltip for? Trying to understand whether tooltips are most often use on focusable elements or not.