How can I display a tooltip on an HTML “option” ta

Question

Either using plain HTML or jQuery assisted JavaScript, how do you display tooltips on individual <option> elements to aid the decision process (there is not enough room for a different kind of control and some help will be needed).

Can this be done though a plug-in or similar?

I have tried a few tooltip plugins for jQuery with no success (including the one called Tooltip).

This solution should:

• work in IE, WebKit as well as Gecko;
• utilizing standard <select> wrapped <option> elements.

So if the solution wants to use other tags it should convert those elements into what it needs dynamically (and not expect the initial mark-up to be any different).

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The code for this can be found here, it is under the SafeSurf section, where I want to display some help on rollover of the options as to the meaning of the choices. At present it can only be displayed "after the fact" and some upfront help for the user would be beneficial.

Appreciate that this is not easy and that something will probably need to be created - so the bounty will be awarded to the most complete solution or the specific hook that lands me closest to a solution I can create.

Answer 1

I don't believe that you can achieve this functionality with standard <select> element.

What i would suggest is to use such way.

http://filamentgroup.com/lab/jquery_ipod_style_and_flyout_menus/

The basic version of it won't take too much space and you can easily bind mouseover events to sub items to show a nice tooltip.

Hope this helps, Sinan.