Thursday, April 7, 2016

usability - Why does the title attribute have a delay?


In HTML the title attribute usually displays a little popup conveying information about the element. In most—if not all—browsers the popup doesn't appear immediately but after few seconds.


Why was it decided that there should be a delay and how long that delay should be?


What benefits are there to the user with there being a delay and the tooltip not appearing immediately after hover?



Answer



Without a delay just moving your mouse around would accidentally make popups appear and flicker across your screen.


That'd draw users' attention away from what they're doing if they didn't expect it, and probably annoy them because flickering stuff provides no value to them: it's unlikely they wanted to read the title and unlikely they even have the time to do it.


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