HTML Table with cell background text - html

What is the best way to go about displaying an html table with text in the background of each cell? I am making a calendar and I would like to have grey dates in the background of actual text.
The only thing I can think of at this point is to have the date and the cell content in separate divs that float over one another but even that isn't implementing well within a table.
By the way using an image to display the date is not really an option IMHO.

Use relative positioning in the content span:
<tr>
<td>
<span class="day">6</span>
<span class="contents">Contents go here</span>
</td>
</tr>
And in CSS:
span.day {
line-height: 20px; /* just to give it a height */
display: block;
color: #aaa;
}
span.contents {
position: relative;
top: -20px;
}
Now the spans are overlapping, with contents over day number. You might want to adjust the position but this should work.
Even though this would work, I would advise you to use images. You can embed all the required dates in one image file (the CSS sprite technique), it gives you greater control with less browser specific issues.

Hmm... if I understood correctly, the way I would do it is probably something like the following in each cell:
<div class="cell_container" style="position:relative;">
<div class="cell_bg" style="position:absolute; width:100%;
height:100%; z-index:0; color: gray;">29/12/2009</div>
<div class="cell_fg" style="position:absolute; width:100%;
height:100%; z-index:1;">Jim's birthday</div>
</div>
Naturally, you can move the styles into a seperate css file. You might also be able to do away with the container div and just apply the "position:relative;" style to the containing cell. The major downside to this method is that you will lose the ability to vertically align in IE, without some trickily implemented workaround.

I realize you said that using an image is "not an option IMHO", but may I suggest that using images would give you a lot more flexibility in the appearance of the date. You could use any font available to your image editor, rather than the limited set of fonts you can count on in a browser. And all sorts of image tweaking tricks could be aplied that would be immpossible in the browser.

Related

extending <a> elements to extend gradient nav bar to end of page

I'm creating a site with a horizontal navbar in which the buttons are designed as elements, making them easy to differentiate, and they individually light up when you a:hover over them. Here's a link: http://allpropestmanagement.net/commercial2.html
Obviously not a finished product.
My current problem involves that big purple field on the far right of the navbar, the one that's not a button. That too is an element, but with hover disabled and a whole load of nonbreaking spaces to pad it. That's the problem. I would like that purple field to extend all the way to the right end (with a tiny margin, like it does on the left side). The trouble with nbsp, as you can imagine, is that there's a finite number of them, and they don't scale. So if the navbar is the perfect length on my computer with, say, 16 nbsps, on someone else's machine it won't reach all the way and on yet another person's it will reach too far.
The html looks like this:
<div id="navmenu">
<form>
Home
Commercial
Meet The Pro
Contact
<a id="farright" style="border-top-right-radius:25px;">
<i> "We'll get the job done right!"
</i></a>
</form>
</div>
I feel odd saying this, but the css is kind of bulky and I'm having trouble formatting this post. Perhaps I'll add it in a few minutes once this post is visible, but the css file is "smithmicropurple.css".
Anyway, I would like a way to stretch that element so it always fits correctly, or if not, some other method that achieves the same effect. I have already tried setting widths individually for each element and that doesn't appear to work.
I like to do these types of things to "help" others (rarely, if I'm lucky), but also to help me learn more about html/css.
So I've given it the old college try with this FIDDLE.
HTML
<div class='holderdiv'>
<a href='#'>One</a>
<a href='#'>Two</a>
<a href='#'>Three</a>
<a href='#'>Four</a>
<a href='#'>We'll Get the Job Done Right!</a>
</div>
I won't post the CSS because it's pretty long. It's in the fiddle.
Please don't consider this a "real" answer. Perhaps just something to think about.
Semantically, I am not sure why the parent is a form element, i'd suggest changing that to a HTML5 <nav> element. (assuming you're using HTML5, of course)
The approach taken here is to set the child elements to display:table-cell, and give the targeted element, #farright a width of 100% to fill the remaining space. Also, text-align:center will effectively center all the child elements. No need for %nbsp;
#navmenu {
font-size: 14pt;
margin: 5px 0 0 5px;
}
#navmenu form {
width: 940px;
}
#navmenu form > a {
display: table-cell;
white-space: nowrap;
text-align:center;
}
#navmenu #farright {
width:100%;
}

Are we supposed to be able to trust empty DIVs to show in HTML5?

Having seen advice seemingly change over the years regarding use of empty DIVs (ie. <DIV CLASS="somediv"></DIV>) I'm confused as to the current thinking over whether or not to use when a DIV will have no inner HTML.
I can find no definitive confirmation over whether we can rely on all modern browsers to display background color and image correctly at the specified width & height when there is no inner HTML, so I'm thinking maybe we can't rely on it - yet it's such a seemingly basic area.
I have even seen suggestions that empty DIVs should never be used - but do specs really state it is 'wrong' to have empty DIVs, or is it just unreliable? (I've tried finding reference to them, but maybe I'm using the wrong terms).
To illustrate, here are 5 areas where I would normally use an empty DIV, in the absence of any recommended alternative:
as a placeholder for content which will subsequently be fetched by XHR calls
as a way to manually create space in a layout
where an image is defined in CSS (as a background image, but will effectively be foreground)
where the text will come from the CSS using .somediv:after{content:SOMETEXT}
where CSS is used to display graph bars etc using solid background color
Maybe there are different answers for each of these, which might explain the complexity over this issue.
I have, of course, tried discovering already, but for example the SO question Is necessary to show an empty <div>? suggests to me there is a huge amount of "IMHO", "probably", "seems to work" in this area. I would expect that by now that some official consensus has been reached on best practice.
So.. should I use and if so should I set font-size to the same as the smaller of DIV width/height to ensure that space is filled in all browsers? Are there any other CSS tricks to ensure this will work in all browsers?
The browser is not going to discard or forget your container just because it does not have any contents (yet).
If you want the container to have a specific placeholder shape, then you might give it min-height, min-width, height and width and make sure it's display: block;.
If you are still unsure, you can fill it with a spacer.gif/png without padding and margin.
http://jsfiddle.net/APxNF/1/
Short answer. Yes, browsers will render the div even if there is no content.
Long answer, That might now always be the case. I have worked in the web for 8 years now and never had to use these, but here they are anyway.
jsFiddle demo
HTML
<div class="empty1"></div>
<div class="empty2"></div>
<div class="empty3"></div>
CSS
.empty1 {
background: #FBB829;
height: 100px;
width: 100px;
}
.empty2:before {
content: "\00a0";
}
.empty2 {
background: #FF0066;
height: 100px;
width: 100px;
}
.empty3 {
background: #F02311;
min-height: 1px;
height: 100px;
width: 100px;
}
Sources:
Experience
Empty div with 2px width and background color doesnt show with height as 100%
http://csscreator.com/node/36023

How to make pure css floating tooltips (absolutely positioned span) dynamically resize to accommodate text

I recently had an idea for using the CSS pseudo-class :hover to display a styled tooltip when the mouse is hovered over a link.
The basic code for the link looks like this:
.hasTooltip {
position:relative;
}
.hasTooltip span {
display:none;
}
.hasTooltip:hover span {
display:block;
background-color:black;
border-radius:5px;
color:white;
box-shadow:1px 1px 3px gray;
position:absolute;
padding:5px;
top:1.3em;
left:0px;
max-width:200px; /* I don't want the width to be too large... */
}
This link has a tooltip!<span>This is the tooltip text!</span>
The result is exactly what I want, but with one annoying problem: the span does not expand to accommodate text, and if I don't specify a width, the text is squashed.
I did some searching on Google, found a couple examples of work people had done (this example is creepily similar to what I've gotten), but no one seems to have addressed the span width problem I'm having.
I know this answer is extremely late, but it appears the key to your issue would be to use:
white-space: nowrap;
inside of your span, and get rid of any sort of width definition. Of course the drawback to this will be that the tooltip will only be able to support a single line. If you want a multiline solution you will most likely have to use javascript.
Here is an example of of this method:
http://jsbin.com/oxamez/1/edit
An added bonus is that this works all the way down to IE7. If you do not need to support IE7, I would suggest folding the span, and img styles into a :before, and :after for the .tooltip. Then you can populate the text using the data-* attribute.
I don't think there's a perfect solution to this problem with pure CSS. The first problem is that when you place the span inside the a tag the span only wants to expand as far as the width of the link. If you place the span after the the a it's possible to get close to what you're trying to do but you'll have to set the margin-top: 1.3em and then have to set a negative margin to slide the tooltip left. However, it's going to be a fixed setting so it won't sit exactly at the start of each link.
I whipped up a jQuery solution that sets left dynamically (and a nice little fade effect for good measure).
Demo: http://jsfiddle.net/wdm954/9jaZL/7/
$('.hasTooltip').hover(function() {
var offset = $(this).offset();
$(this).next('span').fadeIn(200).addClass('showTooltip');
$(this).next('span').css('left', offset.left + 'px');
}, function() {
$(this).next('span').fadeOut(200);
});
These tool tips can also be integrated into a word press theme easily. Just copy the CSS into your style. Css file and when creating your posts, just take help of the HTML code and create your own tool tips. Rest is all styling, which can be altered according to your own choice. You may also use images inside the tool tip boxes.
http://www.handycss.com/how/how-to-create-a-pure-css-tooltip/
Even though this question is a bit older already, I would suggest the following compromise:
Just use max-width: 200px; and min-width: 300%; or so,
whereas the min-width could result higher than the max-width.
Just figure it out.
This way you could not have entirely liquid tooltips but the width would stand in kind of a correlation with the width of the containing link element.
In terms of optical pleasantness this approach could be of value.
edit:
Well I must admit it is nonsense what I wrote. When the min-width can be higher than the max-width, there is no sense to it.
So just putting the min-width in percent would achieve what I tried to suggest.
Sorry for that.
I found this and it was working for me. It's a good solution when you have a lot of elements and jquery plugins on the same page and you can't work with
Text <span>Tooltip</span>
View pure CSS solution: JS BIN
Credit to trezy.com

Clicking through layers/divs

If I have two layers on a page, split horrizontally, with the second layer overlapping part of the first layer, is it possible to make it "click through"?
I have links in the first layer, which the second layer overlaps, which stops the links from being clickable. Is there a way to make the layer display, but be click through, while still having it's own links clickable?
edit:
Here is an example, with html and a stylesheet.
The test links become unclickable when inline with the header in Layer3, but below that they are fine. Is there a way to rectify this?
<title>Test</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="test.css" type="text/css">
<body>
<div id="Layer0">
<div id="Layer1" class="Layer1">
<h3 align="left">Brands</h3>
</div>
<div id="Layer2" class="Layer2"><h1>TEST</h1>
<div id="rightlayer">
TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>
</div>
</div>
<div id="Layer3" class="Layer3"><h1>Ed Hardy Auctions</h1>
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>
And the css
#Layer0 {
width:100%;
height:100%;
}
body {
margin:10px 10px 0px 10px;
padding:0px;
color:#999999;
font-family:"Trebuchet MS",arial,sans-serif;
font-size:70.5%;
}
#Layer1 {
position:absolute;
left:10px;
width:200px;
margin-top:17px;
font-size:1.0em;
padding-left:12px;
padding-top:8px;
}
#Layer2 {
background:#fff;
margin-left:199px;
color:#000;
}
#rightlayer {
float:right;
}
.Layer3 {
position:absolute;
top:67%;
padding:20px;
width: 100%;
}
Thought I would update this as I'd been struggling with this for a few hours and think i've found a solution. Looked into using Jquery but the CSS property:
pointer-events:none;
...did exactly what I wanted.
It is not possible if you want the divs to stay in their current x,y, (and most importantly) z - only the "top" layer is clickable.
Addendum post OP edit:
Think of CSS layout as if you were physically working with bits of paper (this is much easier to visualise if you give all your "layer" divs a different background colour). The rendering engine cuts out a bit of paper in the dimensions you give it (or it works out) for each element it finds. It does this in the order it encounters them putting each bit of paper on the page as it goes - the last item is going to be on top.
Now you've told the rendering engine to put your 3rd div in a position where it overlaps the 2nd. And now you expect to be able to "see" the covered content. Wouldn't work with paper, won't work with HTML. Just because it's transparent doesn't mean it's not taking up space.
So you have to change something.
Looking at your CSS and markup (which honestly could be cleaned up, but I'll assume there's other mark-up you're not showing us which justifies it) there's a couple of easy win ways:
1). Set a z-index of -1 on Layer3 - z-index is how you can change the layering order from the default (as encountered). This just moves the entirety of Layer3 below the rest of the page so what was hidden becomes exposed, but also vice versa depending on content.
2). Change the width from 100% to e.g. 80%, or more likely given your use of pos:abs set left:0px and right:199px; (I'm guessing that padding-left on Layer2 is an intended column width?). The cost of this is that your Layer3 is no longer 100% width
3). Google "CSS column layout" and find a pattern that reflects what you need and adapt that. Every CSS layout which can be done has been done a million times already. Standard techniques exist which solve your problems. CSS is hard if you haven't built up the experience, so leverage the experience of others. Don't reinvent wheels.
It would be a mammoth job, but it is possible.
You would need to capture the click event on the top layer/div, and find the cursor x-y position.
Then find all links in the layer/div underneath the top layer, and see if it's position on the screen falls around the current mouse position.
You could then trigger the click of the matched link.
I would use jQuery (if you are not already) for this and then re-post with a jQuery tag if you run into troubles.
It is hard to tell without seeing some code.
You could try setting z-index on the bottom layer but that works on elements that have been positioned with absolute, relative or fixed (position:absolute).
edit after seeing code:
Add position:relative; z-index:100; to #rightLayer.
Or you could remove the width:100% from .Layer3.
You may want to refactor your code and go with a two column layout for #rightLayer and .Layer3.
css
#Layer0 {
width:100%;
height:100%;
}
body {
margin:10px 10px 0px 10px;
padding:0px;
color:#999999;
font-family:"Trebuchet MS",arial,sans-serif;
font-size:70.5%;
}
#Layer1 {
width:200px;
margin-top:17px;
font-size:1.0em;
padding-left:12px;
padding-top:8px;
}
#Layer2 {
background:#fff;
margin-left:199px;
color:#000;
}
#rightlayer {
float:right;
}
.Layer3 {
}
html
<div id="Layer0">
<div id="Layer2" class="Layer2">
<h1>TEST</h1>
</div>
<div id="Layer1" class="Layer1">
<h3 align="left">Brands</h3>
</div>
<div class="content">
<div id="rightlayer">
TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>TEST><p>
</div>
<div id="Layer3" class="Layer3">
<h1>Ed Hardy Auctions</h1>
</div>
</div>
</div>
I'm assuming from the example that the links in the rightlayer are the only links that need to be clicked, and that you don't have links in the other layers. If so, you could solve the problem by changing the z-index order of the divs.
Layer1 and Layer3 have position absolute, so if you add a position style (absolute or relative) to Layer2, you will be able to pull that div to the front, also pulling the rightlayer div to be in a higher layer than Layer3.
I added the following to the CSS:
#Layer2 {
position: relative;
z-index: 1;
}
From what I can see that leaves the current page setup just the way it is, but pulls all the elements (including the rightlayer with the links) to the front, so you'd be able to click all the links in it.
For debugging purposes I suggest adding background colors to all the different layers to get an idea of the z-index order of the different layers. With the background color in place it was quite easy to spot the layer that was falling over the links, but also to verify that the new z-index order makes the links available.
Hope this helps!
I submitted a bug years ago to the Firefox Bugzilla saying that there was this very bug in Firefox.
I was told by a Mozilla engineer that this was not actually a bug and that it is the correct behaviour as per the HTML/CSS specifications.
Unfortunately I can't find the original bug to reference as it was about 6 years ago.
The reason I submitted the bug was because I could click through the top div onto the links below when using IE (6 I think) but Firefox would not let me.
As usual, it turned out hat IE had the incorrect implementation and Firefox was working as intended by the spec.
Just because a div is transparent does not mean you should be able to click through it.
I'm not sure how you could get around this with JavaScript or CSS. I would take a step back and have a re-think about what you're trying to achieve and how you're trying to achieve it.
Greg
Can you not simply set the width of the div to auto (the default for absolute positioning - i.e. just delete the width:100% from .Layer3).
That way the div will only be as wide as is necessary, rather than unnecessarily overlapping the links.

Best Ways to Get Around CSS Backgrounds Not Printing

It often works out great that the CSS backgrounds don't print, however, sometimes I use them to convey contextual information. What is the best way for getting around CSS backgrounds that don't print but you really want to display. The example, I'm currently working on is a table that displays financial information. Different background colors are used to indicate how "good" a number is (e.g. very profitable, profitable, neutral, negative, very negative).
I've used borders to simulate backgrounds when I really need a background color. Something like this will work (but I apologize for not having tested this):
div.must-have-background-for-print {
position: relative;
width: 400px;
}
div.must-have-background-for-print div.background {
position: absolute;
top: 0;
left: 0;
height: 100%;
border-left: 400px solid #999;
}
In response to #Steve Quezadas' comment, the idea is that rather than using a background, you insert an element into the element that needs the background and apply an extremely wide border to it so that it fills the outer element. This will most likely require that the contents of that element also are inside of another wrapper so that they appear above the new background element...
If you started with this:
<div class="has-background">Some stuff in here</div>
You might use this:
<div class="has-background">
<div class="background" />
<div class="content">Some stuff in here</div>
</div>
This is extremely ugly, but I've used it in the past and it does solve the issue of background colors not printing. And, before you ask, you'll have to adapt the css to your specific case. I'm simply describing the concept of using borders to replace backgrounds. Your implementation will depend on how your page is structured and this is extremely difficult to do if you don't have either fixed widths or heights on your elements.
Two suggestions:
Color-code text in the table rows
Add color-coded icons to the beginning or end of the table rows
You could even incorporate these into the normal view with your background colors.
I ran into the same problem color coding tabular data in html, eventually I just switched to pdf generation for color printouts and only made black and white available in html
It's a browser setting. Turn on background printing in IE. So, you can either change the browser settings (possible if on an intranet) OR just export your report to Excel or some other format for printing.
You could make the font bigger and/or bold and/or italic and/or colorful.