206 Part II: HTML, XHTML, CSS, and Accessibility Figure 8-26: The Sliding Doors effect. Figure 8-27: Horizontal rule fade effects. note To learn the Sliding Doors technique as well as some variants, see www.alistapart.com/articles/slidingdoors/.
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Chapter 8: Style Tips for Type and Design 205 Secret #145: Rounded Tabs Still another interesting effect offered up by Eric Meyer is a technique whereby you can use images to create a rounded tab effect in horizontal list navigation. Rounded tabs are a mainstay of navigation, providing a softer look than square tabs tend to offer. The beauty of this technique is that it is supported in all contemporary browsers (see Figure 8-25). Figure 8-25: Rounded tab technique from complex spiral consulting. note This technique is described in a white paper on Eric s consulting Web site, at www.complexspiral.com/publications/rounding-tabs/. Secret #146: Sliding Doors Another awesome effect for tabbed navigation is the Sliding Doors technique created by CSS designer Douglas Bowman. In this technique, you use two separate images, one small and one large, to create a sliding effect. This allows you to create dynamic navigation that is far more friendly to the resizing of fonts while maintaining the navigation design. Figure 8-26 shows the concept at work.
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204 Part II: HTML, XHTML, CSS, and Accessibility Figure 8-23: IE will only display the top links of the menu. Figure 8-24: The same menu with styles completely disabled.
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Chapter 8: Style Tips for Type and Design 203 Figure 8-21: CSS-based mouseovers with images. Figure 8-22: A CSS-based dynamic menu in action. note For more information about the mouseover and menu techniques discussed here, visit Eric Meyer s CSS Edge, at www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/ edge/. A good explanation for hierarchical dynamic menus can be found at www.pixy.cz/blogg/clanky/csshiermenu/.
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202 Part II: HTML, XHTML, CSS, and Accessibility Listing 8-9: (continued) #links a img { height: 0; width: 0; border-width: 0; } #links a:hover img { position: absolute; top: 75px; left: 255px; height: 50px; width: 190px; } li { list-style-type: none; padding: 10px; }
Figure 8-21 shows the results. Secret #144: Dynamic CSS Menus This technique is an extension of the ideas in the CSS mouseover techniques, but it applies the :hover pseudo class to other elements this is actually a perfectly acceptable use of :hover, but, unfortunately, IE doesn t support it. As a result, you ll only have access to the primary links. So, while you can use this effect to create great menus (see Figure 8-22) without JavaScript, you can tdo it in IE (see Figure 8-23). However, because you resimply styling lists, they will tend to degrade to nested lists in most browsers without CSS support (as shown in Figure 8-24).
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Chapter 8: Style Tips for Type and Design 201 Secret #143: Text and Image Mouseovers You can use the same swapping technique using images. In this case, you ll be placing an image element directly into the anchor element and, instead of using the display element to hide and then reveal the image, you ll set the image to have no height and width until the hover state, in which you llinclude width and height (see Listing 8-9). Listing 8-9: CSS mouseovers using images < !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
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200 Part II: HTML, XHTML, CSS, and Accessibility Listing 8-8: (continued) padding: 10px; }
Figure 8-20 shows the results. Figure 8-20: Text mouseovers using CSS work well in today s modern Web browsers. tip Add additional features to your links styles to enhance the look. Or, create an awesome list-based navigation, as described earlier in this book, to create horizontal as well as vertical navigation options with this technique.
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Chapter 8: Style Tips for Type and Design 199 Listing 8-8: Text mouseovers using CSS < !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
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198 Part II: HTML, XHTML, CSS, and Accessibility The first technique of this kind to emerge has become known as Fahrner Image Replacement (FIR), after Todd Fahrner, its creator. First, you create a rule for the image, as in the following example: h1 { background-image: url(header1.gif); background-repeat: no-repeat; height: 25px; } This CSS rule has header1.gif as the background to an h1 element, with no repeating of the image, and a specified height for the image as being 25 pixels. With that taken care of, you add the following rule: span { display:none; } Within the HTML, you d write the following:
So, with full CSS support in a visual browser, the results will render as described. For some time, it was thought that this simple bit of brilliance worked well because screen readers were able to read the hidden text. However, accessibility specialist Joe Clark did some testing on FIR, and found that it was problematic in some screen readers. That completely blew the top off of the practice, considering the whole reason for doing it is to allow a visual design to be completely accessible. note For details, read Clark s Facts and Opinion about Fahrner Image Replacement, at www.alistapart.com/articles/fir/. As a result, a number of alternatives began to emerge, all of them with merit. These were gathered up by Dave Shea at his mezzoblue site, so you can try all the techniques out and determine which, if any, image replacement technique is for you. note For examples of alternative image replacement techniques, see Revised Image Replacement by Dave Shea, at www.mezzoblue.com/tests/ revised-image-replacement/. Secret #142: CSS-Based Text Mouseovers Want to create a mouseover without using any JavaScript whatsoever? Well, you can, as CSS expert Eric Meyer shows us via his CSS/Edge site (www.meyerweb .com/eric/css/edge/). The technique is pretty simple, and taps into the use of the display property to hide text, and then have that text appear in a specified position upon hover, as demonstrated in Listing 8-8.
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Chapter 8: Style Tips for Type and Design 197 Figure 8-18: Top portion of Door to My Garden. Figure 8-19: Detailed view of Door to My Garden.
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