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Wednesday, September 14, 2016

A CSS-only Approach to Tooltip Icons for Help Text in Episerver

I was working through cleaning up the interface for my latest Episerver project the other day - clearly defining names, adding icon attributes to pages, adding helpful descriptions - and I saw a Tweet buzz across the wire for an article on adding icons to properties with Help Text (Description). The article is actually really good, and it got picked up by a couple colleagues of mine who implemented the solution in it. It's by Ted Nyberg and you should check it out here: https://tedgustaf.com/blog/2016/icon-for-property-help-texts-in-episerver/.

It sparked a memory for me, though, of another article I had bookmarked a short while back by Alf Nilsson, on how to expose the Help Text (Description) alongside the property name in the UI, eliminating the need to hover. Again, it's another good article and you should read it as well: https://talk.alfnilsson.se/2014/12/18/display-help-text-in-on-page-editing/.

Both of these articles touch on a pain point of mine, and various other Episerver developers, around how the Help Text (Description) is displayed for properties in the UI, and it got me thinking of another approach to address this issue, essentially combining these two ideas.