Interacting with Tooltips and Previews on Home Services

Dec

Interacting with Tooltips and Previews

posted by admin in Gutter Cleaning

In this third part to a four-part series on adding Ajax to your web site, you’ll learn about tooltips and in-page previews. It is excerpted from chapter four of Adding Ajax, written by Shelley Powers (O’Reilly, 2007; ISBN: 0596529368). Copyright ? 2007 O’Reilly Media, Inc. All rights reserved. Used with permission from the publisher. Available from booksellers or direct from O’Reilly Media.

As I stated in the beginning of this chapter, if you’ve been out to the Netflix or Blockbuster Online sites, you’ve seen how moving the mouse over a movie-related link or image pops up information about the movie, as well as a link to add the movie to the queue. This is probably one of the best uses of tooltips I’ve seen. It quickly provides more detailed information about an object rather than forcing users to go to another page. This is especially advantageous if the site user is browsing through many items. Tooltips can be used for anything: a shop, getting more detailed information about a row of data returned from a database, camera information associated with a photo, and so on–anytime you want to provide information about an object within a browsing context.

The only modifications required to convert the JIT application in the prevous section into a tooltip is to provide a bubble-like background for the text and position it so that it’s close to where the mouseover event occurs. Sounds simple, but it begins to add to the amount of code.