Tooltips, DHTML, javascript - BoxOver

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  What is BoxOver?

BoxOver uses javascript / DHTML to show tooltips on a website. Implementation of the tooltips, however, requires no knowledge of DHTML or javascript. Move your mouse over the items below to see examples.

Plain | Fade | Delay | Custom CSS | Fixed position | Click to display

You can use combinations of the above as well.

- BoxOver is free and distributed under the GNU license - If you wish to use it in a commercial product please link back to http://boxover.swazz.org and acknowledge it's use somewhere - If you would like to contribute please link back to this page so that I can make BoxOver the most popular tooltip available Enjoy!

If you like BoxOver be sure to check out the new Swazz javascript calendar!

  Download

Latest version: 2.1 (17th June 2006) Click here to download the latest version of BoxOver tooltips.

Fixed the infamous delay bug, for more info check these posts post 1 post 2

Thanks to Andrew Cronin for emailing me the update!

  Installation

Step 1
Include the folllowing somewhere in the HTML of your page

NB: Make sure "src" points to the correct location of the boxOver.js file

Step 2
Next, go to the code for the HTML element you would like the tooltip to appear over.
For instance, imagine we had the following "div" in our HTML document.

This "div" looks as follows:

BoxOver is configured through the "title" attribute of HTML elements.  
To make a tooltip appear over the "div" above we alter the code as follows:



This "div" now looks like this:

  Settings

The "installation" section details the most simple way to initialise BoxOver. 
There are many tweaks which can be set to customise it to your needs. 
As shown above BoxOver is set through a tag's "title" attribute. 

The general format is given by



The following table lists settings for BoxOver.

Parameter	Possible values	Default	Description
header	Any character	blank	Specifies the header text of the tooltip
body	Any character	blank	Specifies the body text of the tooltip
fixedrelx	Any integer	N/A	Forces the X-coordinate of the tooltip to stay fixed (offset is relative to the annotated HTML element)
fixedrely	Any integer	N/A	Forces the Y-coordinate of the tooltip to stay fixed (offset is relative to the annotated HTML element)
fixedabsx	Any integer	N/A	Forces the X-coordinate of the tooltip to stay fixed (X is an offset relative to the body of the HTML document)
fixedabsy	Any integer	N/A	Forces the Y-coordinate of the tooltip to stay fixed (Y is an offset relative to the body of the HTML document)
windowlock	on / off	on	Make tooltip stick to side of the window if user moves close to the side of the screen.
cssbody	Any defined style class	Built in styles	Specifies CSS class for styles to be used on tooltip body.
cssheader	Any defined style class	Built in styles	Specifies CSS class for styles to be used on tooltip header.
offsetx	Any integer	10	Horizontal offset, in pixels, of the tooltip relative to the mouse cursor.
offsety	Any integer	10	Vertical offset, in pixels, of the tooltip relative to the mouse cursor.
doubleclickstop	on / off	on	Specifies whether to halt the tooltip when the user double clicks on the HTML element with the tooltip.
singleclickstop	on / off	off	Specifies whether to halt the tooltip when the user single clicks on the HTML element with the tooltip. - if both singleclickstop and doubleclickstop are set to "on", singleslclickstop takes preference.
requireclick	on / off	off	Specifies whether the user must first click the element before a tooltip appears. Intended for use on links so that information appears while the link is followed.
hideselects	on / off	off	Specifies whether to hide all SELECT boxes on page when popup is activated.
fade	on / off	off	Specifies whether to fade tooltip into visibility.
fadespeed	Number between 0 and 1	0.04	Specifies how fast to fade in tooltip.
delay	Any integer	0	Specifies delay in milliseconds before tooltip displays.

  Demo

Move your mouse over the block below or the highlighted words to to see BoxOver tooltips in action. Move your mouse over the highlighted words in this sentence to see different uses for BoxOver.

  Features

Optimised for lowest CPU usage with lightning response times

Tested in all major browsers

Easy to set up with only a basic knowledge of HTML

Open source

  Example

You can see a working example page with BoxOver here.

  Changes / Bugfixes

19 Jan 2005	Fixed bug of tooltip not appearing when hovering over the tooltip's HTML element before the page is fully loaded.
27 Jan 2005	Created the example page you see below.  Also changed script so that normal title attributes on a page still work.
05 Feb 2005	Sorted out opacity in default styles for FireFox. Also altered event binding slightly.
11 Feb 2005	Revamped the example page.
20 Apr 2005	Added "singleclickstop" attribute allowing user to specify whether window should halt element is singleclicked.
15 Jun 2005	Made change to fix bug with intermittent problems regarding boxover not appearing/initialising.
This last change is a lie. My change didn't actually do anything, oops. But the problem is fixed by placing the <SCRIPT> tags at the bottom of the page
12 Jul 2005	Fixed DOCTYPE error where boxover was not working with certain DOCTYPE declarations. Thanks to Relien from France for sending me the update!
24 Jul 2005	Fixed scrolling bug in IE6 when standards mode invoked with DOCTYPE, see forum for details.
31 Aug 2005	Included option to hide select boxes to workaround IE6 bug with select boxes.
25 Sep 2005	Fixed DOCTYPE and CSS problems.
16 Nov 2005	Added new requireclick attribute for use on links as requested in the forum
12 Dec 2005	Added delay and fade options
16 Apr 2006	Fixed IE 5.0 bug, IE6 bug, restructured certain things post 1 | post 2
17 Jun 2006	Fixed delay bug, post 1 | post 2

  Uses

Tooltips

Data grids with BoxOver showing extra details for each row

TITLE attribute replacement

Neatening presentation

  Compatability

Works in all latest browsers incl. IE 6, IE 5, Mozilla 1.4+, FireFox 0.9.3 Opera 7

  Some Background

Well BoxOver went through many changes over the time I developed it (ey stop yawning). It started uot as a behaviour - which was a problem because you limited to IE, though there was a component out that some sharp bugger developed which allowed using behaviours in mozilla. There was some problem I couldn't resolve going this route though - also it required that the user be familiar with XML, too complicated for all you dummies out there. So then I came up with the idea of configuration through the title tag. At first I wanted to see if browsers would recognise custom tags (e.g. <img boxover="">) which I could manipulate javascript side. Problem was that some browsers didn't pull the value through from the HTML into javascript. So Then I decided on the TITLE tag. It's for tooltips afterall and it made sense that they one should be able to stylise them. The initial spark which made me decide to do it was using overlib. Probably the best known tooltip out there. I didn't like it though, it was 30kb big first off - thats quite a chunk to download just for tooltips. Also it used up a lot of CPU and tended to flicker. It is also harder to set up, you need a basic knowledge of javascript - well not really though you do have to call a javascript function which might frighten some people away. So I designed this component with all this in mind, and after many many hours of trying different methods I got it working just as I envisioned it. In the process I learnt one hell of a lot of javascript. It also feels good to know that a couple of people out there might use something I wrote. Well if you finished reading this, nice one. Over and out.