demo · v142

Wikipedia-Style Link Previews

The marquee use case the spec authors describe: in-flow link hovercards, like Wikipedia's page-previews extension or the GitHub username peek. Each link below carries interestfor="…" referencing a popover with a card. Hover with a mouse, focus with the keyboard, or long-press on touch to preview; click still follows the link.

Chrome 142 ships interest invokers, the missing half of declarative hover UIs. Before this, you wired popover=hint elements up by hand: pointermove listeners, focus listeners, focusout-to-dismiss race conditions. With interestfor a single attribute does it all, including touch long-press and keyboard-driven previews via the same accessibility primitive AT vendors agreed on.

concept interestfor attribute A declarative way to wire a button or anchor to a popover, with browser-handled hover delay, focus, and dismissal.
prior art popover=hint Shipped earlier in Chrome 133. Provides the dismissible popover surface but left invocation up to the page.
platform One attribute, four input modes Hover, focus, long-press, and AT-driven "show details" all converge on the same browser event — no per-page polyfill.
interestfor supported
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last event
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On unsupported browsers the links still render and click through normally; the hovercards just won't surface on hover. Touch users on supported Chrome: long-press a link to preview it.

relevant markup

<a href="/x" interestfor="card-x">hover me</a>

<div id="card-x" popover="hint">
  <strong>X</strong> the actual hovercard content
</div>

see also