Tooltips in iPhone's Mobile Safari?

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Level 2

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Tooltips in iPhone's Mobile Safari?

It says here that "Similar to hover styles, tooltips are not displayed unless the user touches and holds a clickable element with a tooltip.", but when holding down on an image, it instead shows a menu with the option to save the image.

http://developer.apple.com/safari/library/documentation/AppleApplications/Refere nce/SafariWebContent/CreatingContentforSafarioniPhone/CreatingContentforSafarion iPhone.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40006482-SW21

Is there still a way to see tooltips, or is this outdated?

Macbook Pro (silver), Mac OS X (10.6.2), iPhone 2G

Posted on Jan 24, 2010 1:18 PM

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Answer 1

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g-pod Author

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Jan 25, 2010 4:12 PM in response to neuroanatomist

It's not working for me. Tapping once on an image with alt and/or title text doesn't seem to do anything.

As a prominent example, if visiting xkcd.com:

<img src="http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/science_montage.png" title="The rat's perturbed; it must sense nanobots! Code grey! We have a Helvetica scenario!" alt="Science Montage" />

Neither of the text for those attributes appear.

Likewise, title attribute for something like <a href="something.html" title="This text">Else</a> doesn't show up either.

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Answer 2

Jan 24, 2010 1:24 PM in response to g-pod

Assuming your are a registered developer, you should post this in Apple's developer discussions area for the iPhone.

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Answer 3

g-pod Author

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Jan 24, 2010 10:54 PM in response to Allan Sampson

I just meant, as a user, is there a way to display tooltips? I thought the answer was no, but there's documentation suggesting otherwise (and it appears to be incorrect). I'm wondering if anyone can confirm.

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Answer 4

Jan 25, 2010 4:59 AM in response to g-pod

Yes, you can view tooltips in the iPhone Safari browser. Do not tap-and-hold, just tap. For clickable text with tooltips, tap-and-hold brings up a JavaScript Open/Cancel dialog, tapping open displays the tooltip. For a clickable image with a tooltip, tap-and-hold does bring up the Save Image dialog (and you cannot access the tooltip). But in both cases, a simple, single tap brings up the tooltip.

Try the many examples on this page: http://www.walterzorn.com/tooltip/tooltip_e.htm.

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Answer 5

Jan 25, 2010 4:28 PM in response to g-pod

Back to web design school for you... 😉

The 'prominent examples' you list below are HTML attribute (title or alt) tags, which many browsers, but NOT the iPhone's Mobile Safari, render as tooltips. Tooltips which are implemented via javascript are accessible on the iPhone via a tap.

http://javascript.about.com/library/bltip1.htm

Also, see this related page in the iPhone developer documentation (linked to from the page you posted above).

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Answer 6

g-pod Author

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Jan 25, 2010 4:35 PM in response to neuroanatomist

Well, I meant tooltips in the informal sense, knowing that it's up to the browser how to handle alt and title attributes, such as the days when Netscape/Mozilla/Firebird/Firefox made the distinction between treating title as a tooltip, and alt as not (unlike IE).

I don't really consider JS-powered tooltips true tooltips, nor CSS-powered tooltips either. I was curious about how to access the title attribute text for any element on the iPhone, given that Mobile Safari doesn't seem to provide even an alternative to the defacto tooltip seen on desktop browsers.

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Answer 7

Jan 25, 2010 4:44 PM in response to g-pod

g-pod wrote:
I was curious about how to access the title attribute text for any element on the iPhone

So, now you know the answer - the iPhone cannot, at least with Mobile Safari. Not sure about 3rd party browsers, though.

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Answer 8

g-pod Author

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Jan 25, 2010 5:08 PM in response to neuroanatomist

😟 Oh well, thanks though!

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