arrow_back Index

The Tooltip

also known as: The Hover Label, The Infotip, The Title Attribute's Ambitious Descendant

Threat Level
★★★★★
ClassAuxiliary · Contextual Guidance
RarityCommon
CRCR ½
HabitatIcon buttons, truncated text, form labels
"The Tooltip is the smallest creature catalogued in this volume, and by considerable margin the most misunderstood. It is invoked constantly, in contexts for which it was never intended, to solve problems it is constitutionally incapable of solving."

— Preface to Chapter IV, Heuristic Order Field Manual, 3rd edition

The Tooltip is a creature of pure hover-dependency, and this is its fundamental limitation. It communicates supplementary information — never essential information — to users who possess a mouse and choose to pause over a target. This rules out every touch screen user and every keyboard-only user. A dungeon whose essential labels live exclusively in Tooltips has erected barriers at its entrance and called them decoration.

The creature is most legitimately deployed as a label for icon-only buttons, where the icon alone may be ambiguous, and as expanded context for interface elements whose labels have been truncated for space. In these roles it is genuinely useful, extending the dungeon's vocabulary without cluttering its surfaces. Outside these roles — as a substitute for visible labels, as a mechanism for hiding required instructions — it becomes a liability.

Fig. II — A Tooltip hovering above a cursor. Wing-like appendages aid buoyancy. Eyes peer from within the dark label box. The ghost outline above indicates a prior position; the creature moves with the cursor, slightly delayed.

The Tooltip's most consequential technical detail is its delay: a tooltip that appears immediately on hover produces false positives as users move their cursor across the dungeon. A delay of 300–500ms filters these accidental triggers while remaining fast enough to feel responsive. The creature also vanishes the instant the cursor moves — a behaviour so instinctive it is rarely remarked upon, but which becomes deeply inconvenient when the tooltip's content needs to be selected, copied, or read at length. Rich Tooltips that contain interactive content require a different creature entirely.

swords Vital Statistics

STR3(−4)
DEX18(+4)
CON4(−3)
INT8(−1)
WIS11(+0)
CHA12(+1)

auto_awesome Special Abilities

Hover Dependency (Passive). The Tooltip is invisible to touch screen users and keyboard-only users unless additional implementation effort is made. On touch devices, there is no hover state; the tooltip either fires on tap (competing with the tap action) or never fires at all. Any information that must be universally accessible must not reside in a Tooltip.
Evasion (Passive). The Tooltip vanishes the instant the cursor departs its target. This prevents users from moving their cursor onto the tooltip itself to read it at leisure. The Rich Tooltip variant (which does permit this) is a different creature and requires different handling, including full keyboard dismissal and ARIA role="tooltip" correctly applied.
z-index Ascension (Passive). The Tooltip renders above all other content and must be correctly positioned to avoid clipping at viewport edges. Implementations that fail to check boundary conditions produce a Tooltip partially hidden behind the dungeon wall — visible enough to confirm its existence, not visible enough to be read.

shield Weaknesses

  • Touch screens — the creature has no interaction model for a world without hover; any essential information must be provided by other means
  • Visible labels — if space permits a visible text label, the Tooltip is redundant; prefer the label
  • Focus trigger — implementing the Tooltip to appear on keyboard focus as well as hover extends its reach to keyboard users; this is correct behaviour, not an optional enhancement
  • role="tooltip" + aria-describedby — properly associating the tooltip with its target ensures screen readers announce the description

category Known Variants

  • The Focus Tooltip — also appears on keyboard focus. Superior to the hover-only variant in every measurable way. Should be the default.
  • The Rich Tooltip — contains images, links, or formatted text. Requires hover-persistence so the cursor can enter it. Technically a popover.
  • The Truncation Tooltip — reveals full text when content has been cut short by space constraints. The most defensible use case.
  • The Title Attribute — the Tooltip's ancestral predecessor. Browser-rendered. Inaccessible on touch and keyboard. Still widely deployed. The Order has given up.

edit_note Field Notes

Note I. — If you are using a Tooltip to explain what a button does, consider whether the button should have a visible label instead. The answer is usually yes. The Tooltip is a supplement to clarity, not a substitute for it.

Note II. — Never put required information in a Tooltip. Error messages, required field indicators, critical warnings — these must be visible without the user having to discover them by hovering. The Tooltip communicates enhancement; it must not communicate necessity.

Note III. — The delay before appearance (300–500ms) and the delay before disappearance (100–150ms) are both consequential. The appearance delay prevents accidental triggers. The disappearance delay gives users a brief window to move their cursor onto a Rich Tooltip. Neither delay should be zero.

The Component Bestiary · Vol. I · Entry II — The Tooltip