Much like any piece of code, there are occasional exceptions.  Recently I wanted to add tooltip functionality to several web screens.  I wanted something beyond the native browser tooltips, those always feel junky and unreliable.  In the process of writing a small library, I stumbled on to Walter Zorn’s tooltip library.  I scanned the documentation, then paused.  On the surface it looked great, it had the tweaks I really wanted: cross-browser support, delay for opening and closing and HTML support.  But would it really work?

Implementation was simple enough, download the javascript files, reference them and call a single function.  Ok, I like simplicity, I like the way he passes parameters to his functions and the script files were small enough.  So I decided to give it a try…and was very impressed!  Sure enough, it worked as advertised the first time.  I tested in a few browsers (FF 3 and 3.5, IE 7 and 8 and Chrome) and the tooltips worked and looked great.  They even have drop shadows, a very nice touch.

So I must say that this library is an exception to my rule, I am very impressed and plan to use it more throughout my sites.  Tooltips are a small but elegant addition to a quality site, they provide necessary but unobtrusive help to the user.  This library gives you the ability to add them quickly and easily…download and try it today.  He has several other javascript libraries, I hope to find time to experiment with them sometime soon.  Highly recommended!