I have a website in which I provide tool-tips for certain things using a hidden <span> tag and JavaScript to track various mouse events. It works excellently. This site somewhat caters towards people with vision issues, so I try to make things degrade as well as possible if there is no JavaScript or CSS and generally I would say that it is successful in this regard.
So my question is, is it possible for these <span> to only exist if CSS is being used? I have thought about writing out the tool-tips in JavaScript on document load. But I was wondering if there is a better solution.
Perhaps you need to re-think the way you are providing tooltips. Could the content be contained in the title attribute of a semantically appropriate element?
EDIT: If you provide more info, someone might be able to suggest more of a solution. What sorts of elements are the tooltips popping up on? Images? Would the abbreviation tags be appropriate?
Quick Solution I just came up with:
<span>has access to the core attributes, which include title, so you could include the tooltip text in the title, and use a javascript library like jQuery to display tooltips for all spans with a title.