Hide native tooltip using jQuery

Question

Is there a way to hide the native tooltip action when a user hovers over a anchor tag with a title attribute? I don't want to remove it just don't display the nasty yellow box that is the default tooltip action.

UPDATE:

After reading a couple of other posts I don't think I can hide the title attribute for the native tooltip action, but I'm trying to think outside of the box here. Could I use another attribute instead of the title attribute inside the anchor tag and still keep a valid page???

Removing the title attribute value is not an option unless someone can figure out how to add it back for a onclick event?

WORKING CODE BELOW

$('[title]').each( function() {
    var $this = $(this);
    $this.data('title',$this.attr('title'));
    $this.removeAttr('title');
});

$('a').click( function() {
    var $this = $(this);
    var title = $this.data('title');
    ... do your other stuff...
});

Answer 1

To get it out of the title, I would use the data() method:

$(document).ready( function () {
    $('.items_with_title').each( function () {
        $(this).data('title', $(this).attr('title') );
        $(this).removeAttr('title');
    });
});

// to access it
$(document).ready( function () {
    $('A').click( function () {
        alert($(this).data('title'));
    });
});

You could also make the selector for any item that has a title attribute:

$('*[title]').each(...

Answer 2

The original poster only wanted to disable the native action of .tooltip(). If that is the case, use the following simple solution:

$(function() {
    $( document ).tooltip({
        items: "[data-tooltip]",
        content: function() {
            var element = $( this );
            if ( element.is( "[data-tooltip]" ) ) {
                return element.attr('data-tooltip');
            }
        }
    });
});

Now the [title] attribute is disabled and the tooltip will only trigger when an element has a [data-tooltip] attribute. By defining more 'items' you can create different behavior and styles:

$(function() {
    $( document ).tooltip({
        items: "[data-tooltip],img[alt]",
        content: function() {
            var element = $( this );
            if ( element.is( "[data-tooltip]" ) ) {
                return element.attr('data-tooltip');
            }
            if ( element.is( "[alt]" ) ) {
                return element.attr('alt') + something_else;
            }
        }
    });
});

http://jqueryui.com/tooltip/#custom-content & http://api.jqueryui.com/tooltip/#option-items

Answer 3

Here's another spin-off that you might find useful, in case you use a lightbox JS plugin that still needs the "title" attribute for title processing on the lightbox slides:

$('a.lightbox-trigger').each(function() { // Process all lightbox trigger links

    $(this).mouseover(function() {
        if(!$(this).data('keep'))  // 1st time = FALSE, so make the swap
            $(this).attr('data-title', $(this).attr('title')).attr('title', '');
        $(this).data('keep', true); // Preserve value if hovered before clicked
    });

    $(this).mousedown(function() {
        $(this).attr('title', $(this).attr('data-title')).attr('data-title', '');
        $(this).data('keep', false); // Mark element as safe to swap again
    });
});

Answer 4

Apparently the title attribute doesn't fall under the normal event handler. Anyway, my original answer didn't work, though I'll keep playing with it to see if I can get it to work. If you need to retain the title attribute but don't want the popup effect, as indicated in your comments, then store the title attribute in the element's data and use it from there.

$('[title]').each( function() {
    var $this = $(this);
    $this.data('title',$this.attr('title'));
    $this.removeAttr('title');
});

$('a').click( function() {
    var $this = $(this);
    var title = $this.data('title');
    ... do your other stuff...
});

Original answer:

Give every element that has a title a specific hover over handler that prevents the default action.

$('[title]').hover(
   function(e) {
       e.preventDefault();
   },
   function() { }
);

Except after testing it doesn't seem to work.

Answer 5

You can hook the 'mouseenter' event and return false which will stop the native tooltips from being displayed.

$(selector).on( 'mouseenter', function(){ return false; });