Tooltip on anchor's title not shown in IE9

Question

Has something was changed in the way IE9 treats the title attribute in an anchor tag? I try to use a regular anchor, such as -

<a href="http://www.somelink.com" title="Some title here">This is a link</a>

A tooltip should be with the title is expected to appear, and it does appear in previous versions of IE and also in other browsers, but not on IE9. Is there a know issue with that? I tried to search the web for that, but found nothing about this. Any ideas? Thanks

Answer 1

I have encountered this problem in a few applications I've worked on.

I've found it doesn't work if you have nested elements within the element with the title.

The example below doesn't show its title in IE9 for me:

<a href="test.html" title="test tooltip"><span>test link</span></a>

However, this example does work:

<a href="test.html" title="test tooltip">test link</a>

That is with an XHTML 1.0 Transitional doctype and Browser Mode: IE9 and Document Mode: IE9 Standards.

Obviously your example doesn't have a nested element but thought it might be relevant to some people who find this post based on the title.

You can overcome this limitation in IE by specifying the nested element to be an inline-block:

a span {
    display: inline-block;
}