So why anyone does not use tooltips in his/her design?

Third, we have already get an alt and title properties in each tags. In terms of SEO, the external text of tootip for a phrase will not tell any semantic relation to search engine robots. Elements in <pre id=”phrase01″>phrase</pre> and <div id=”tt_for_phrase01″>some tooltip contents</div> are mutually independent in the DOM tree and surely in the Google Big Table as well. They have a relation only in the browser with some JavaScript library.

Fourth, we might not be understand what is the status of tooltip contents. Are they footnotes? Why don’t we literally describe them after the paragraph where they are attached as footnotes? Or else, if the contents should not be shown in ordinally (or anyhow) contexts, why do we present them as a contents at all? Yeah, you may want to make a small webpage and hate scrolling…

Finally but not least, under a certain condition, it is hard to determine which is the anchor to show tooltip on the webpage. If you make an anchor with <a> tag, it must be an violaiton against commonplace knowledge. Tooltips are not link anchors, they would not carry you to another place, nor launch another window. So, you should configurate another presentation for such <a> elements with CSS. And if you make an anchor to launch a tooltip with <pre> tags or else, you should inform users them as anchors. So, they must be emphratized with <strong> or something in CSS enhancements. But when you use <strong> tags, your phrase must be (logically) emphatized phrase. Are you intend only to launch a tooltip, and to emphatize at once? If you do not have such an intention, changing its colour will be interpreted as an emphatization from users.

I would like to address these questions against people use tooltip scripts. It will be small and nice tool indeed, but we have never understood what is the tooltip in hypertext document and what is the most usable way to show it.

(note) タイトル修正。”anyone” だけで否定的なニュアンスが通じると思ったけど、やっぱりストレイトフォワードにした。