Question

If I have an image in an anchor, how can I make the title of the anchor appear, and not that of the image element?

I know I could remove the title attribute with javascript, but I’m hoping there is a simpler solution.

For example

<a title="Anchor Title"><img title="Image Title" /></a>

If you hover over the link, it will display “Image Title”.

What I’ve Tried

With CSS, I thought maybe I could change the z-indexes to push the anchor to the front, or maybe I could display the anchor as a block and give it the width and height of the image. This did not work. See JSFiddle here.

I was hoping to find a solution with CSS or maybe HTML.

The reason I want to do this is is that I’m working with WordPress, spitting out posts and thumbnails. I want the thumbnails to link to a certain page, and I want to have a universal title for the link, but it is taking the title from the individual thumbnails. Here’s the WordPress/PHP code:

<a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="Click to see Featured Stories">
<?php the_post_thumbnail(); ?>
</a>

Answer 1

This offers a general solution, disregarding WordPress. CSS prevents the title to show up.

HTML:

<a title="Anchor Title">
    <img title="Image Title" src="http://codepen.io/images/logo.png" />
</a>

With CSS:

a {
  display: inline-block;
}

img {
  pointer-events: none;
}

Result

See CodePen example