Tooltips, as most of you probably know, are those small box of text that appear when you hover your mouse cursor over something. Traditionally, tooltips would give a 5 or 6 word summary of what the thing you're pointing at does. In other words, it gave a "tip" for the "tool". Well, Microsoft Office 12 will be featuring what is temporarily being called "Super tooltips".

The super tooltips will still appear in boxes, but now they will support formatting, such as paragraphs and headings, and even inlined images.

[W]e add to every feature's tooltip a short text description letting you know what that feature is for. We've written these in the form of: "This is the right feature to use if you want to [tooltip text here]." The concept is to give you the idea of what a feature is for without needing to look it up in help or in a manual.

[...]

We want tooltips not just to help answer the question "what is this feature called?" but also "why would I use it?", "how do I find out more about it?", and "why is it disabled and how can I enable it?"

Jensen Harris, head of Microsoft's User Experience team

Here's a screenshot of a super tooltip with embedded images:

And here's a screenshot of a super tooltip explaining why a command is disabled:

Hopefully the other platforms will copy and super tooltips will become a standard GUI widget, thus making its way into Java 7.