Title text

The Comic section is one of the four main sections of the xkcd.com website.

The title text for 2760: Paleontology Museum

The title text, also known as mouseover text or tooltip, is an HTML attribute Randall puts on almost every xkcd comic to add something tangentially relevant to the topic of the comic. In some of the early comics, the title text was also used to comment on how they were drawn (see 24: Godel, Escher, Kurt Halsey) and explain the joke (see 5: Blown apart). In a few comics, the title text is missing. The comic with the longest title text is 1363: xkcd Phone (816 characters), while 1311: 2014 has the title text with the highest word count (134 words).

I do occasionally fix typos and things but to my knowledge none of the comics were ever missing a tooltip. It's all in a database (overbuilt, I know) and I think I would have noticed an empty field. More likely someone was just confused by their browser's erratic tooltip display behavior. Sometimes you have to do little incantations (or mouse over a link and then back onto the picture) to get them to appear.

—Randall Munroe, Source

It can be accessed in many ways:

• By hovering the mouse pointer over the image on the main site;
• By clicking the "^(alt-text)" button next to the comic title on the mobile site;
• By viewing the official transcript of the comics;
• By installing a browser helper

Randall uses the "title" attribute rather than the "alt" attribute in the HTML sources. In the comics feed and API data the "alt text" is labelled "alt".

This is one of 52 incomplete explanations: Explain that Randall previously erroneously called it "alt text" (like in 45) and mouseover text, but he more recently calls it "title text", like in 442. (Give a bit of history.) Add more comics/examples of Randall calling it "alt text", "mouseover text", and "title" text. Explain that in the book xkcd: volume 0, comics sometimes include a different title text. Better explain Category:No title text and Category:Multiple title texts. Explain the use of title texts in the images of his what if? articles (explained here) and how the use changed from describing the image to adding jokes. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!