How is 'relative' positioning placing the tooltip at the correct position? - css

Question

Here's an example of a CSS tooltip. The author positions the toolip relatively.
.tooltip{
display: inline;
position: relative;
}
However, the tutorial says,
Relative. This type of positioning is probably the most confusing and
misused. What it really means is "relative to itself". If you set
position: relative; on an element but no other positioning attributes
(top, left, bottom or right), it will no effect on it's positioning at
all, it will be exactly as it would be if you left it as position:
static; But if you DO give it some other positioning attribute, say,
top: 10px;, it will shift it's position 10 pixels DOWN from where it
would NORMALLY be. I'm sure you can imagine, the ability to shift an
element around based on it's regular position is pretty useful. I find
myself using this to line up form elements many times that have a
tendency to not want to line up how I want them to.
There are two
other things that happen when you set position: relative; on an
element that you should be aware of. One is that it introduces the
ability to use z-index on that element, which doesn't really work with
statically positioned elements. Even if you don't set a z-index value,
this element will now appear on top of any other statically positioned
element. You can't fight it by setting a higher z-index value on a
statically positioned element. The other thing that happens is it
limits the scope of absolutely positioned child elements. Any element
that is a child of the relatively positioned element can be absolutely
positioned within that block. This brings up some powerful
opportunities which I talk about here.
What I understand is that, without modifiers like top, left etc. relative is equivalent to static and goes with the flow of the page. Then how's the tooltip being displayed at the correct position, i.e. above the hyperlink? Shouldn't it appear at the end of the page instead?

Answer 1

The CSS you provided for tooltip is not complete. I think you saw it in w3schools. But note that there are two elements for it: a parent element with .tooltip class and a child element (actual tooltip text) inside it with .tooltiptext class.
the parent element has position: relative without any top, left ... positions which acts as you said as a static element in its original (normal) place. But the child tooltiptext inside it has a position: absolute which is why it is seperated from normal text flow and put over them.
Here is a sample:
.tooltip {
/* this is just to add meaning for position:absolute of .tooltiptext */
position: relative;
color: navy;
}
.tooltip .tooltiptext {
/* Position the tooltip */
position: absolute;
z-index: 1;
top: 100%;
left: 10%;
/* style the tooltip */
min-width: 50px;
background-color: #ff9;
color: black;
font-size: 10pt;
border-radius: 3px;
padding: 3px 10px 6px;
white-space: nowrap;
visibility: hidden;
}
.tooltip:hover .tooltiptext {
visibility: visible;
}
<span>Sample: </span>
<span class="tooltip">Hover over me
<span class="tooltiptext">Tooltip text</span>
</span>