This works fine on my computer but im wondering if its a good idea in terms of accessibility, etc.
I have a page of product listings, and I want each listing to link to a product page. The listing is made up of an image and a few photographs of text.
I want the entire listing area to be a link, including white space. So rather than make the images and text links individually, ive put the entire div in a link.
As I said, this is working fine on my computer, but is a good idea for a production site?
Thanks
If it's like a grid or something, and you give a visual cue when the user moves the mouse over the row (background color changing etc) along with the cursor becoming a hand, it should be fine if you use the whitespace as part of your link.
If you want me in your website's audience, I would prefer if you wouldn't. When switching between windows, clicking in the window area is the quickest way to switch focus between windows. If like 80% of your window is really a link, I would find that annoying. I think I am not the only one.
The way it sounds there is also plenty of area which you can make behave like a link, such as the image, and the text in the grid. If that would be clickable, that would be big enough a target to hit.
Also imagine your app being used on a touch screen. These sometimes imsinterpret drag (scroll/zoom) and tick gestures. Which is annoying if everything responds to clicks.
Look at the right-side video links on YouTube. These are block-layout spans wrapped in a tags. (Not that just because Google does it means it's a good idea, but...)
If the area has a :hover color (as these do), then it should be clear enough to the user that this is an action item.
Syntactically it's invalid, you cannot put block elements (div, p, table) inside of inline elements (span, a, strong, em).
Related
Thanks for the great answers last time, I had been working on that problem for days, and someone solved it in ten minutes. Amazing!! So now I have another question for this talented community!
I'm using Sitefinity for this project; long story short, I don't even know where to access the CSS file, and accessing it would probably break the site (as my boss tells me). So everything has to be done with inline styling.
Here's the setup: there's a bunch of text (in a ul), and an image. The text wraps around the image, which is small enough that the text is squished to the left at first, then continues in its full width underneath.
When the screen gets too small, the text starts wrapping around the image (which has been floated right) in weird ways; one long word can make the text stop and start again after the picture (I've already suggested adding word-break for this, but it's a no-go).
Here's what my boss wants: image floats to the right of the text on larger screens, then floats above and center on smaller screens. Again, no stylesheet, just inline styling.
Some attempted ideas:
Use asides: can't. That needs the stylesheet. (Unless someone who knows this knows a better way!)
Use padding on the image: tried. It messes up the formatting; what works to push everything underneath on mobile squishes everything to the side on desktop. (If someone knows a better way, let me know!)
Use JS: can't. Basically, everything has been styled somewhere deep within the code, so I've just got a tiny HTML text box to work with, no tag to work with at all.
Thank you for all suggestions! This is a talented community!!
You should us a CSS widget, add some classes to your then within the CSS widget write the appropriate media queries, if you need this to affect more than one page put the CSS widget on a template instead of an individual page.
I've got a tough one. I work for a company that uses a sharepoint that is 100% text based due to varying network performace issues accross the world. It provides the option to input HTML for styling but scrubs any javascript. I do not have access to code CSS and I'm assuming jquery is not available.
I would like to embed images into the sharepoint as a proof of concept by taking advantage of a floating div (or iframe) that displays with an href to display a png file stored on a server. I don't want the div (or the image) to load unless the user clicks a link or a button.
I'm pretty amature at anything other than basic HTML formating. I'm not even sure it's possible to do something like this with only html.
Thank you in advance to anyone willing to take a stab at this.
You could do it with this HTML, which is ugly and unmaintainable.
Use an iframe with scrolling="none". Use width and height attributes to give it dimensions.
Inside the iframe have your img elements with an id attribute. Ensure they're spaced with enough vertical space so they can't be seen by default, and appear isolated when viewed later.
Link your links to those id attributes, e.g. link
I have a couple of questions about the problem of hiding text inside an anchor tag and only displaying a background image.
Note to those about to bombard me with links to other articles and tell me that this is a repeat question: I have scoured this site and the web in general and read the solutions (and by solutions I mean mostly hacks) people came up with. What most people seem to be doing (or have done up until recently) was the -9999px hack. Also popular is/was wrapping the text in a span and doing something like this or visibility: hidden.
Now, I personally think that "hiding" the text would really only make sense in the first place if it was hidden dynamically, i.e. displayed only if the background image wasn't loading (for whatever reason). However, all the "solutions" I found effectively remove the text completely or at least hide it permanently so even if the background image isn't loaded, the text still wouldn't be displayed.
So here are my questions:
Why would one want to have text and then permanently hide it at all? Why not just leave the anchor empty - i.e. just don't put any text in it - and only have the image displayed? Why have text and then go through the headache of figuring out how to hide it? What's the point of that? Am I missing something here?
Now that we have CSS3, are there actual non-hacky, dynamic ways to hide text when the background image is displayed and have the text appear when the image - for whatever reason - fails to load? I couldn't find any resources so I am assuming this is not supported but maybe one of you ninjas knows better?
There are different possibilities why to do that:
Search Engines scan the web and also gather content that is visually hidden. The site gets better in terms of semantics and has a higher page rank.
Many visually impaired people rely on content that's read to them by screenreaders. Sometimes text in the alt-tag is just not enough. Background images don't even have such a tag.
To your second question:
To me there is no known way to check if a background-image is successfully loaded and is also shown (a totally different story!). CSS only styles content according to defined rules. There may be a javascript way to do it, but in my opinion it isn't worth the cost because mostly this text isn't really a fallback. It has a different purpose as stated above.
On succession of a previous question I tried to find out if the next thing is possible:
Take you have a render, like a soccer player with a transparant background. You add this render to your html & css. The transparant parts are now part of the image 'box'; you can't click on links under the image transparant parts, but you can see them.
Is it possible to make these links clickable? Thus having the image as highest z-index, but still have the links clickable and working.
(the links have a lower z-index because their background then stops under the image, giving a nicer design)
(Or said otherwise: have a .png image with a transparant background not shown as a box, but as only the colored pixels. Preferable only in html/css)
I think it is not possible, to be honest. If you do not yet understand my question, maybe my previous will help you:
need help fixing the link's clickable area
You can use pointer-events to make an event (click in this case) bubble through to the layer below.
No, it's not possible from what I'm aware of. However you can do similar things to what you want that may be useful:
Turn an area into a link using <map>
Use pointer-events:none so that clicks are ignored on the top element
IE 10 provides the non-standard msElementsFromPoint method that allows you to "peek below" an element; you can do that inside the click handler and determine if the click point overlaps an anchor. If it does, triggering that element's click event would do what needs to be done.
Unfortunately I am not aware of similar functionality for other browsers or earlier versions of IE.
I'm building the landing page for our app, and i found some inconsistencies when opening up my page on google chrome. I designed the page to have the text be on the right side of the picture. However sometimes when i refresh the page, the text drops below the picture. This doesn't happen all the time, but if i keep pressing refresh, the text will eventually drop.
I'm assuming that it's because i might be putting my width of the div a little too narrow. but i dont understand why it works sometimes and not other times.
the site is on : https://www.thedashapp.com/about.html
(disclaimer: the site isn't supposed to be live yet, so the links aren't all properly hooked up yet, and the app still hasn't launched)
See pictures:
How it's supposed to look like:
What happens when i click refresh a couple times:
You'd be better off putting the text in a separate div, and perhaps the image too. Then apply float:left; to both the div containing the text and the image or div that contains the image. I'm pretty sure that'll fix it.