Text that only exists if CSS is enabled - html

I have a website in which I provide tool-tips for certain things using a hidden <span> tag and JavaScript to track various mouse events. It works excellently. This site somewhat caters towards people with vision issues, so I try to make things degrade as well as possible if there is no JavaScript or CSS and generally I would say that it is successful in this regard.
So my question is, is it possible for these <span> to only exist if CSS is being used? I have thought about writing out the tool-tips in JavaScript on document load. But I was wondering if there is a better solution.

Perhaps you need to re-think the way you are providing tooltips. Could the content be contained in the title attribute of a semantically appropriate element?
EDIT: If you provide more info, someone might be able to suggest more of a solution. What sorts of elements are the tooltips popping up on? Images? Would the abbreviation tags be appropriate?
Quick Solution I just came up with: <span> has access to the core attributes, which include title, so you could include the tooltip text in the title, and use a javascript library like jQuery to display tooltips for all spans with a title.

A quick hack would be to color the text the same as the background (say, white on white) in html, and then use CSS to change the color back to something visible (black on white). Of course, this is only relevant for people able to see the text. Screen readers and such wouldn't see the text as hidden.

CSS is also used by screenreaders to help define which page elements are read or not.
Screen readers will almost always ignore elements with display:none applied to them, so not using CSS is not a valid indicator of a screenreader's presence.
I would go with Chris' idea of using javascript to generate the tooltips based on a title (or alt) attribute.
You could use JS to ensure that tooltips are only displayed when valid styles are set, so if JS is enabled and CSS disabled you can treat the extra information differently (eg footnotes).
http://juicystudio.com/article/screen-readers-display-none.php
http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200711/screen_readers_sometimes_ignore_displaynone/

Related

CSS fix or CSS reset for all websites

I have made a small popup window that shows up at the bottom of the page (like a recommendation system). But whenever I embed my script to any of the client's website, it disturbs my CSS. Like the CSS which is on the client's website overshadows my CSS and this causes me to fix my CSS for each client. Is there a fix that I will have to install on my code?
Please help
Thanks
This is due to overlapping CSS properties of client's and your newly developed. I recommend you to inspect element of google chrome's very nice feature. You can individually identify your overlapping properties. If this is too much complex. Like James commented give a new id to your pop-up menu, which will separate your pop-up CSS from all other components on your web page
On of the ways I heard about is Shadow Dom, and in this article it describe it and at the beginning of the article he listed the problem in brief: http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/webcomponents/shadowdom/
But there is a fundamental problem that makes widgets built out of
HTML and JavaScript hard to use: The DOM tree inside a widget isn’t
encapsulated from the rest of the page. This lack of encapsulation
means your document stylesheet might accidentally apply to parts
inside the widget; your JavaScript might accidentally modify parts
inside the widget; your IDs might overlap with IDs inside the widget;
and so on.
Else which I did my self long time ago is: to name all your ids, classes with a special names for example 'mywebsite.myclass' this may minimize the issue. and I saw this way is used by many bookmarklets which import html,css and javascript to user opened page.
"All browsers" is a lot of browsers :P
CSS is going to get interesting soon thanks to shadow DOM. You are going to be able to create a web component that is completely isolated, DOM and CSS, from the rest of the document, which is exactly what you want.
Obviously, it's not in place in al browsers (only in Chrome at the time of me writing this). Meanwhile, this is what I would do:
Use shadow DOM components if available
Anyway, manually name-space everything you use (CSS classes, JavaScript, etc)
Try to use custom elements for everything. (that way, there's less risk of your e.g. <h2>s being styled by outer CSSs)
As a last resource, use very specific selectors (look up CSS specificity), and use !important. Just to be clear: never do this routinely!
Most of that stuff will fail for some value of "All browsers". You'll have to compromise somewhere, I guess.
Yes you can reset your div styles.
Something like this:
div.your-popup * {
/* your reset */
}
And try to set !important to styles or put them inline.
In addition create unique class names that no one can override it.
P.S. http://www.cssreset.com/

Is it ok to place a <div> inside an <a> [duplicate]

This question already has answers here:
Closed 10 years ago.
Possible Duplicate:
Is putting a div inside an anchor ever correct?
I want to have a link on a complex element (containig images, paragraphs and other stuff).
I know it works, but is it ok to have a <div> element inside an <a> element ?
Yes … and no.
No complete HTML or XHTML recommendation allows it.
The HTML 5 draft does permit it, but you may have to do things such as explicitly setting display: block on the anchor to get it to work in some browsers. You may find that others simply don't support it (I'd like to be able to link to a reference that shows browser support for this, but don't know of one, please comment if you do.)
That said, while have nice big click targets can be useful, it isn't an approach that is friendly to the "skim through links mode" that some browsers (especially screen readers) have. You might be better off using a regular link in the content, and applying some JavaScript to react to a click on the whole element.
In XHTML1.0 and HTML4.01: no. a is an inline element that can only contain other inline elements (but not another a).
In HTML5: yes, you are allowed to do that. BUT consider why you would've hundreds of characters in a link.
It's bad for SEO (dilution I believe) and bad for many disabled users ("Hey screen reader, tell me what does this link do?" - "Let me read to you aloud this link for half a minute") and perhaps bad for usability.
Another solution would be to put a link on say your heading in your div or some meaningful text. Then in JS make your div behave like what you wanted to do initially. Then it'll work for users using an assitive technology (screen readers and alike), for keyboard users (they can tab through the link) AND for sighted mouse users with JS.
No, unless you don't care about IE7 and down. The link will not function properly in IE7, even if set to display:block.

style considered harmful?

We have some code that removes "dangerous" attributes and tags from HTML. I noticed that style is among the list of "dangerous" attributes. What could be the risk from that attribute?
In IE you can include #behaviors in there which can load little Javascripts.
With CSS3 you can also interject little bits of text, which could be dangerous depending on your website.
Here's an example of a bug in MediaWiki that creates a vulnerability based on inline style attributes.
It's possible to make things that are invisible or otherwise very deceptive using style sheets. For example, you could put a giant, invisible anchor link over the whole page so that when the user clicks on something, he's taken to an identical page on a server in Russia.

Is using the style attribute frowned upon?

As someone who is beginning to make a transition from table based design to full CSS I'm wondering if using the style attribute to make adjustments to elements is considered "cheating" and if absolutely ALL presentation should be strictly in the style sheet?
See also:
A question of style - approaches to styling and stylesheets
There are cases where you know for sure that all you want to do is tweak the style of this one specific element, and nothing else.
In those cases you can happily use an inline style attribute. But then, at some point in the future, you'll realise that in fact you need to apply the same style to something else, and you'll realise you were wrong.
Been there, done that. 8-)
I feel there's an aspect that has not been touched upon here: the distinction between hand-edited HTML snippets and generated HTML snippets.
For human editing, it's probably better and easier to maintain to have the styles in a file.
However
As soon as you start generating HTML elements, with server-side scripts or with some kind of JavaScript, be sure to make all styles required for basic functionality inline!
For example, you wrote some kind of JavaScript library that generates tooltips. Now, you will inject DIVs into your page, that will need some styles. For example, position: absolute and, initially, display:none. You may be tempted to give these elements the class .popup and require that this class has the correct definitions in some CSS file. After all, styles should be specified in the CSS file, right?
You will make your JavaScript library very annoying to reuse, because you can no longer simply copy and invoke one .js file and be done with it. Instead, you will have to copy the .js file, but also have to make sure that all styles required by the script are defined in your CSS file, and you have to go hunting for those, and make sure their names don't conflict with classes you already have.
For maximum ease of use, just go ahead and set the required styles directly on the element as you create it. For styles that are purely for aesthetical purposes, such as background-color, font-size and such, you can still attach a class, to give the consumer of your script an easy way to change the appearance of your script elements, but don't require it!
You can use the style attribute, but the point of using CSS is that you make a change in a single file, and it affects the entire site. Try to avoid it as much as possible (old habits die hard)
It's not maintainable. All of us have done it. What you're best to do is put every adjustment into a style. Let me teach you something most developers do not know about CSS ... you can use N styles at a time.
For example, imagine you have a great style for colorized divs called someDIVStyle:
.someDIVStlye
{
background-color: yellow;
...
}
You want to use it, but just want to adjust the background-color to blue. Many people would copy/paste it and then make a new style with the change. However, simple create a style like this:
.blueBackground
{
background-color: blue;
}
Apply it as such:
<div class="someDIVStyle blueBackground">...
The style furthest to the right always overrides the properties of the styles preceding it. You can use a number of styles at once to meet your needs.
I agree with some other posters that it is best to keep the style information in the stylesheet. CSS tends to get complicated quickly, and it is nice to have that information in one place (rather than having to jump back and forth from HTML to stylesheet to see what styles are being used).
A little off-topic tip: Pressing F12 in IE8 brings up a great tool that lets you inspect the styles of elements in web pages you're browsing. In Firefox, FireBug does the same thing. Those kinds of tools are lifesavers if you want to know how a style change will affect an element.
It's a very "personal" question, to me the word "ALL" is a very strong word. You should do your best to have most of the styling in your css. but you can use style occetionally if it makes your life easier.
Generally it is best to have styles on the style sheet especially if it will be used multiple times, but using the style attribute is definitely not "cheating". A quick look through the stackoverflow source shows many examples of this.
Yes, it's kind of cheating, but it's up to you if you want to cheat a little. :)
The fundamental idea of having the styles in a style sheet is to separate the content from the layout. If you use the style attribute you are still mixing layout within the content.
However It's not that terrible, as you can quite easily move the style into a class. It's quite handy during development to be able to set a style on a specific element so easily without having to make up a class name and worry how the style will cascade.
I sometimes let the style attribute go through in the production code, if it's something that is specific for just one page, and if it's doubtful that it will be there for long. Occationally just because I am pressed for time, and it can be cleaned up later on...
So, even if you use a style attribute sometimes, you should still have the ambition that all the styles should be in a style sheet. In the long run it makes the code easier to maintain.
As others have said, in general, no.
However, there are cases where it makes perfect sense. For example, today I had to load an random background image into a div, from a directory with an unknown # of files. Basically, the client can drop files into that folder and they'll show up in the random background image rotation.
To me, this was a clear reason to dynamically build up the style tag on the div.
In addition, if you're using, for example, the .net framework with webforms and built-in controls then you'll see inline styles used anyway!
There can be very good reasons to put style information in a specific page.
For example, if you want to have a different header background on every page (travel agencies...), it is far easier to put that style information in that specific element (better, in the head of the document...) than to give that element a different class on every page and define all those classes in an external style-sheet.
The style attribute does have one important use: setting style programmatically. While the DOM includes methods to manipulate style sheets, support for them is still spotty and they're a bit heavyweight for many tasks, such as hiding and showing elements.
Yes, the style attribute is frowned upon in general. Since you're moving to the CSS method from table-based, I'd strongly recommend that you avoid inline styles. As a previous poster pointed out: bad habits are hard to break and getting into the habit of using inline styles for their temporary convenience is a mistake. You might as well go back to using the font tag. There's really no difference.
Having said that, there are occasions where it makes sense to use a simple inline style, but first develop the habit of using stylesheets. Only when you're comfortable with putting everything in a stylesheet should you start looking at shortcuts.
I think that's the general consensus of everyone who posted an answer

How do I have different font colors in a textarea?

I want the font color to change in a textarea as I type in specific keywords, like in Visual Studio.
I have not seen this anywhere, so I don't know if this is possible with HTML and JavaScript.
Has anyone seen anything like this? Or know how to write it?
Textarea is a standard HTML element and so was invented just after the dawn of time. Unfortunately this means it is limited in it's appearance and functionality.
Changing the colours of specific words is not possible as far as I know. However a way to get around this would be to have an iFrame embedded in the page. That way, you can treat the iFrame content as another web page and style it using CSS.
The Yahoo RTE, the FCKEditor and the Lightweight RTE works in this way.
Another option, which does not use an iFrame is the editor used here on Stack Overflow, known as the WMD. The files are here.
It's not possible.
Way to go is to make textarea's font, but not cursor, transparent using color:#000;-webkit-text-fill-color:transparent, then create underlying, 100% overlapping div to which content of textarea will be copied + formatted on textarea's oninput event.
You'll need to adress (or avoid) some issues coming out of syncing these two elements, like scrolling for example, but it can be done. I made my own HTML editor this way.
AFAIK, css property -webkit-text-fil-color is supported in Opera, Chrome and should be in soon-to-be-released Firefox v.48.
You would probably have to run javascript on the client to detect when the text changes, then replace the text to be highlighted with some child html elements with the proper style.
For example
Original text:
This is what the user typed.
Highlighted text
This is what the <a class="className">user</a> typed.