The legend element acts as a label for a fieldset element. In visual browsers, this usually means that the label is visually associated with the group border rendered for the fieldset element. A text-to-speech browser might read the label aloud as a user navigates through a form. Place the legend element immediately after the start tag of the fieldset element for the association to stick. Because the content of the legend element is HTML content, you can assign styles to make the label stand out, if you like.

A single character key that brings focus to, or activates, the first focusable control of the form associated with the legend element. See the description of this shared attribute at the beginning of this chapter for general characteristics.

Controls the alignment of the legend element with respect to the containing fieldset element. See the discussion about text alignment inside a containing box in the Section 8.1.5, earlier in this chapter.

The language being used for the element's attribute values and content. A browser can use this information to assist in proper rendering of content with respect to details such as treatment of ligatures (when supported by a particular font or required by a written language), quotation marks, and hyphenation. Other applications and search engines might use this information to aid the selection of spell-checking dictionaries and the creation of indices.

An advisory description of the element. For HTML elements that produce visible content on the page, IE 4 and later and Netscape 6 render the content of the title attribute as a tooltip when the cursor rests on the element for a moment. For example, the table-related col element does not display content, so its title attribute is merely advisory. To generate tooltips in tables, assign title attributes to elements such as table, tr, th, or td.

The font and color properties of the tooltip are governed by the browser, and are not modifiable under script control. In IE/Windows, the tooltip is the standard small, light-yellow rectangle; in IE/Mac, the tooltip displays as a cartoon bubble in the manner of the Mac OS bubble help system. Netscape 6 tooltips are the same small rectangle on all OS versions. If no attribute is specified, the tooltip does not display.

You can assign any descriptive text you like to this attribute. Not everyone will see it, however, so do not put mission-critical information here. Browsers designed to meet web accessibility criteria might use this attribute's information to read information about a link or nontext elements to vision-impaired web surfers. Therefore, don't ignore this potentially helpful aid to describing an element's purpose on the page.

Although the compatibility listing for this attribute dates the attribute back to Internet Explorer 3 and HTML 3.2, it is newly ascribed to many elements starting with IE 4 and HTML 4.0.