Pro Football Reference Blog

Just this weekend I decided to join the second half of the first decade of the millennium by learning how to put little tooltips on my web pages.

I have never been a fan of menus that expand into enormous submenus when you mouse over them. It seems like I'm always trying to click or read something under the real estate the enormous submenu will claim when I inadvertently drag my mouse across the menu item and the text or link I'm interested in gets clobbered.

On the other hand, I have seen sites make good use of small popup text bubbles that give you a quick bit of information when you mouse over some text, and then disappear when you drag the mouse away.

So I'm not sure if this is a good idea or not, and that's why I'm starting small. When you go to a p-f-r team page, like this one, and look at the team's results, mousing over the opponent will show you that opponent's record. Likewise, when you are at a player page and you mouse over the three-letter team abbreviation in his yearly stat line, it will show that team's record.

It seems to work in Firefox and IE, but apparently not so well in Safari. I suspect that's a minor setback that I can get it worked out. Obviously if I can't make it work in all browsers, then it won't become a part of the site.

Aside from that, what do you think? If you're for it, then how far should it go? What if instead of just the record, it was the record, the coach, the leading passer, rusher, and receiver, and the teams ranks in various categories? What if one could mouse over the "G" column and have the entire game log pop up, instead of having to click over to a completely separate page for the game logs? How much is too much?