Title text

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

The title text for 2760: Paleontology Museum

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 especially 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!

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).

How to access

[T]o 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

Then title text can be accessed in many ways:

• By hovering the mouse pointer over the image on the main site;
• By clicking or tapping 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;
• By opening the info.0.json file, for example http://xkcd.com/info.0.json, http://xkcd.com/485/info.0.json or http://xkcd.com/412/info.0.json

History

Randall didn't add title texts to his comics before xkcd.com, but most of the comics posted on LiveJournal had an original caption beneath the image, and many had comments by LiveJournal users. All the comics transferred to the new site had a title text, which was often along the same lines, but was almost never the same as the caption on LiveJournal. Learn more at LiveJournal.

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". Randall has, at times, refer to "alt text", with one early comic example being the title text of 45: Schrodinger, though that can equally be read as refering to the accompanying "alt=" parameter given to the image, "Schrodinger", as far as the implied joke goes.

Firefox bug

Firefox 2 used to have a long-standing bug where only the initial part of the title text was shown as a tooltip. Firefox didn't show you the rest of the text unless you right-clicked show-property, and you would be able to see a sideways scrollable field of the title-text in the properties for the image. This bug was referenced in the title text of 491: Twitter ("If long tooltips / cut off for you / then upgrade from / Firefox 2 / Burma Shave") and is still mentioned in xkcd.com's About page:

Why can't I read the whole comic mouseover text in Firefox?

They can be read with extensions like Long Titles, or by right-clicking on the images and going to 'properties', then clicking and dragging to read the whole thing. This is a bug in Firefox, Mozilla Bug #45375. It has been outstanding for many years now.

Note: It looks like it's been fixed in Firefox 3.0. Now, as an added tweak, to keep the tooltips from expiring while you're reading, you can use this.

—Randall Munroe, About xkcd