did you know you can add little tooltips to links? you have to be on desktop to see them. look, hover this link to a cool website.
this feature is supported by markdown! for inline, use:
[display text](https://example.org "title text")
and for reference-style, you would do
[display text][ref]
[ref]: https://example.org "title text"
in html, this is the title attribute and it's a global attribute so you can put it on anything, even this <span> right here! </span>. so you can sneak them in just about anywhere.
this is supposed to be used by the <abbr> tag to clarify abbreviations, according to the so-called mdn and the rank-pulling w3, and then graciously extended to everyone else by representing "advisory information related to the element" it belongs to.
but to me it is the goofy thing you put secret text in, on links and images and especially webcomics, which is distinct from both alt text and image description. i know it's not accessible on mobile, and that probably nobody checks for these anyway. i have made my peace with that. it's just very beautiful to me that sometimes html is haunted by tooltips.
and especially links are perfect bearers of this energy. something about their bifurcatory nature makes them excellent conduits for the ephemeral title texts. perhaps i am too wikibrained to talk about links in an unbiased way but they are such a fundamental part of the internet. you're hovering them anyway to check where the url goes, so why not take an extra beat to peek at this too? it engages the same neural pathways as my wikibrain