onmouseover (HTML element)

Description

The onmouseover attribute is one of the most commonly used event attributes. It captures the moment that a cursor crosses the boundary of an element, moving from outside to inside the element to which the attribute is applied. It differs from the onmousemove attribute, which is used to detect movement within the element’s boundaries. Once the cursor is positioned over the element, the onmouseover event remains active until the cursor is moved beyond the element’s boundaries—an event that the onmouseout attribute would capture.

The onmouseover attribute is mostly used to render visual effects such as image swapping or color changes, and has been used in this way for almost as long as JavaScript has been around.

Note that this event attribute cannot be applied to the following elements:

• applet
• base
• basefont
• bdo
• br
• font
• frame
• frameset
• head
• html
• iframe
• isindex
• meta
• param
• script
• style
• title

<div>
  <img src="map.gif" alt="Hover to reveal the location on the map"
      onmouseover="this.src='map_location_revealed.gif';"
      onmouseout="this.src='map.gif';"/>Figures for February’s racing.
</div>

Value

This attribute has no fixed value. It’s up to the author to decide on the scripting that’s included here, be that a call to one or more defined functions, or a simple alert() statement.