Little web popup windows that aren't popup windows?

May 14, 2022 9:57 AM

How does one do those or what is the process called? A quick example is in the first paragraph on Kottke's last post. When you click the + a little hover-above pops up with more info. How does this work?
posted by dobbs to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

It's just a bit of html and javascript. Not any different from the menu that pops out on metafilter (on mobile) when you tap the three bars symbol at the top of the screen.

Edit: as for how it works, when you tap the + symbol, some javascript code runs in the browser to build a little html element with the appropriate content and add it to the page at that location. It's a good example of dynamic page content.
posted by june_dodecahedron at 10:03 AM on May 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

Here's a tooltip library. It's not identical to what Kottke is using, but close enough. Most of the examples show it being activated on hover, but you can set it to activate on a click.
posted by adamrice at 10:11 AM on May 14, 2022

Kottke's page does it using bigfoot.js.
posted by flabdablet at 10:42 AM on May 14, 2022 [2 favorites]

Tooltip, or occassionally called a popover.
posted by pyro979 at 11:03 AM on May 14, 2022

The HTML abbr element can do something very similar on hover and I think may be better at accomodating a variety of screen sizes.
posted by Lanark at 11:30 AM on May 14, 2022

Response by poster: Thanks, all!
posted by dobbs at 6:17 PM on May 14, 2022