Disabling browser tooltips on links and <abbr>s

Question

Hello, I want to suppress the web browser's default tooltip display when a user hovers over certain links and elements. I know it's possible but I don't know how. Can anyone help?

The reason for this is to suppress the tooltip for microformatted date-times. The BBC dropped support for hCalendar because the appearane of the machine-readable date was an accessibility issue for those with cognitive disabilities aswell as some screen reader users. http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2008/07/why_the_bbc_removed_microforma.html

EDIT:

I whipped up a jquery plugin along the same lines as Aron's suggestion...

// uFsuppress plugin v1.0 - toggle microformatted dates
(function($){
$.ufsuppress = function() {
 $(".dtstart,.dtend,.bday").hover(function(){
  $(this).attr("ufdata",$(this).attr("title"));
  $(this).removeAttr("title");
 },function(){
  $(this).attr("title",$(this).attr("ufdata"));
  $(this).removeAttr("ufdata");
 });
}
})(jQuery);

// Usage
$.ufsuppress();

Answer 1

As far as I know it is not possible to actually suppress showing the title tag.

There are some workarounds however.

Assuming you mean you want to preserve the title property on your links and elements, you could use Javascript to remove the title property at onmouseover() and set it again at onmouseout().

// Suppress tooltip display for links that have the classname 'suppress'
var links = document.getElementsByTagName('a');
for (var i = 0; i < links.length; i++) {
    if (links[i].className == 'suppress') {
        links[i]._title = links[i].title;
        links[i].onmouseover = function() { 
            this.title = '';
        }
        links[i].onmouseout = function() { 
            this.title = this._title;
        }
    }
}

Answer 2

Something like this in prototype would blank all title attributes of datetime microformats with a class of 'dtstart':

$$('abbr.dtstart').each(function(abbr){abbr.title=' '})

Note I used a blank space, the Mozilla documentation for element.title states

According to bug 264001 , setting title to the empty string triggers the default inheriting behavior. To cancel inheritance, title must be set to a non-empty whitespace string.

Answer 3

This won't help with your problem but might be interesting nevertheless: There's another universal attribute apart from title which can be used to store data - lang!

Just convert the data you want to store to a continuous string and prefix it with 'x-' to declare private usage in accordance with RFC 1766.

---

In the comments, sanchothefat clarified that he wants to solve the usability-issues with the abbr-design-pattern in microformats. But there are other patterns which are as semantically meaningful (or, in my opinion even more so) than this pattern. What I'd do:

<p>
 The party is at
  <dfn class="micro-date">10 o'clock on the 10th
   <var>20051010T10:10:10-010</var></dfn>.
</p>

together wtih these styles

dfn.micro-date {
    font-weight: inherit;
    font-style: inherit;
}
dfn.micro-date var {
    display: none;
}

In my opinion, the semantically most correct way would be to use a dl definition list - which isn't allowed inside of paragraphs. This can be worked around with the following pattern:

<p>
 The party is at <q cite="#micro-dates">10 o'clock on the 10th</q>.
</p>

<dl id="micro-dates">
 <dt>10 o'clock on the 10th</dt>
 <dd>20051010T10:10:10-010</dd>
</dl>

which requires a more sophisticated stylesheet:

q[cite='#micro-dates']:before {
    content: '';
}
q[cite='#micro-dates']:after {
    content: '';
}
dl#micro-dates {
    display: none;
}

Answer 4

I know this has been resolved but I also found this workaround: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1299772/jquery-hide-native-tooltip-resolved