Opening the can of tooltips

Last week, I opened a can of worms. I asked on social media: Sometimes all you need is a trustworthy title HTML attribute for a text-only tooltip. Only problem is: it can't be styled! Do you want these tooltips to be stylable? Maybe with a ::tooltip pseudo? See the threads on Mastodon and on Bluesky. If only styling was the only problem! I quickly realized that I hadn't had to think about tooltips on the web for a long time. Turns out, the title attribute is strongly discouraged for most use cases, and for good reasons, which I think are: Native tooltips look bad. They can't be styled to match the rest of the page. They're not accessible to all users. Many accessibility specialists, and the W3C itself, discourage relying on tooltips for accessibility reasons. So it's not a surprise that many developers don't use native tooltips that rely on the title attribute. And, when they do, it's often for the wrong reasons. Here is some data to back up this claim. Usage of the title attribute on…