Archive
HowTo: Show block on anchor hover and click to keep open with CSS
I was looking for a way to show a hidden HTML element with just CSS (no Javascript) when mouse hovers over an anchor (say over a “more…” note), while at the same time also supporting touch-only (no mouse) clients, where clicking should show (and keep open) that same element.
I ended up combining solutions and comments from
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18849520/css-show-hide-content-with-anchor-name and
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5210033/using-only-css-show-div-on-hover-over-a#5210074
into
https://jsfiddle.net/birbilis/23nt74se/
Achieved the following behaviour:
- Can hover over an anchor to temporarily show its respective more info block
- Once the info block is open, hovering over that one too (having left the anchor above it) keeps it open (useful to select and copy content from the item)
- Can click on an anchor to show its respective more info block and keep it open. Only one such block is kept open at a time. If multiple exist and you click on another’s anchor, the last one is shown and kept open instead (this doesn’t affect what is temporarily also shown via the hover mechanism).
Notes:
- Could show the item inside the flow or float, e.g. using inline-block instead of block (https://www.w3schools.com/css/css_inline-block.asp)
- I use the :target CSS selector in a bit different way than the original suggestion had, I just set the anchor to jump to itself for easier maintenance of IDs and targets and maintenance-free CSS when adding more targets.
- The anchor with the “openhelp” class must be placed immediately before the item with the help class, since .openhelp:hover + .help is used (https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/sel_element_pluss.asp)
At Trafilm Gallery Metadata forms I ended up using yet another variation with simpler syntax, where the anchor and help text is placed inside a parent div that has text for the item the help is about and that div is marked with class “question”. See https://jsfiddle.net/birbilis/s3kaknt9/ – When the parent questions already have an ID, this has the benefit that you don’t need to add an ID to the anchor, just an href, plus when clicked it scrolls to the parent item (the question) instead of to the help item that is at the bottom of it which would put the question text out of the view when the help link is clicked, if the question is far enough down the page for it to scroll when targetted by the openhelp anchor.
HowTo: Hide HTML markup from non-signedin users at MonoX Social CMS
At MonoX Social CMS, which I use at both ClipFlair Social and Trafilm websites, I was in the need of hiding some HTML markup when the user is not signed-in.
The solution for this is to add runat="server" to the HMTL element one wants to hide and then set the Visible property that the object acquires due to the runat clause. The Visible property is set using some special syntax to access the MonoX API like below:
<ul runat="server"
Visible="<% $Code: Page.User.Identity.IsAuthenticated %>" >
…
</ul>
HowTo: Copy effective-computed CSS style for specific HTML paragraph
I’m in the process of setting up a temporary landing page for the trafilm project, where I need apart from showing the trafilm logo to also show some text description about the project, till I set up an instance of MonoX Social CMS for it, like the one in ClipFlair’s Community website (ClipFlair Social).
Since ClipFlair Social has some nice text styling, I decided to borrow the style of one of its home page paragraphs, using Firefox web browser’s developer tools (accessible via F12 key).
Being at the Inspector tab of the dev tools (which is the default when they first open), using the “Pick element” tool (first one on the dev tools pane’s toolbar on the left), I select the paragraph that looks nicely styled and I go to the Computed tab at the Style view, then press CTR+A to select all computed style CSS declarations for that paragraph element and press CTRL+C or right click and select Copy to copy them to the clipboard.
If pasted (CTRL+V) in some text editor like Window’s Notepad that looks like a big ugly line, since they contain Unix-style line-endings, that is LF (linefeed) and not Windows-style ones (CRLF, Carriage Return + Line Feed), but editors like Wordpad or Notepad++ can show them nicely and even convert line endings from Unix to Windows and vice-versa if you wish so (e.g. in Notepad++ the respective actions are at Edit / EOL Conversion menu).
So, this is the copied Computed CSS style for that paragraph:
border-bottom-color: #333;
border-bottom-style: none;
border-bottom-width: 0px;
border-image-outset: 0 0 0 0;
border-image-repeat: stretch stretch;
border-image-slice: 100% 100% 100% 100%;
border-image-source: none;
border-image-width: 1 1 1 1;
border-left-color: #333;
border-left-style: none;
border-left-width: 0px;
border-right-color: #333;
border-right-style: none;
border-right-width: 0px;
border-top-color: #333;
border-top-style: none;
border-top-width: 0px;
color: #333;
cursor: default;
font-family: "Open Sans",sans-serif;
font-size: 14px;
font-weight: 400;
letter-spacing: 0px;
line-height: 24px;
margin-bottom: 20px;
margin-left: 0px;
margin-right: 0px;
margin-top: 0px;
padding-bottom: 10px;
padding-left: 0px;
padding-right: 0px;
padding-top: 0px;
-moz-border-bottom-colors: none;
-moz-border-left-colors: none;
-moz-border-right-colors: none;
-moz-border-top-colors: none;
As you can see, it has lots of stuff that isn’t needed, unless you want to be sure your style doesn’t get affected by style of parent elements. In my case I decided to trim it down a bit:
color: #333;
font-family: "Open Sans",sans-serif;
font-size: 14px;
font-weight: 400;
letter-spacing: 0px;
line-height: 24px;
margin-bottom: 20px;
margin-left: 0px;
margin-right: 0px;
margin-top: 0px;
padding-bottom: 10px;
padding-left: 0px;
padding-right: 0px;
padding-top: 0px;
Adding around the text above (which is represented by the CSS comment /* … */ below) a CSS selector to wrap those declarations in order to make a proper CSS rule-set:
p {
}
and passing to CSS LINT tool to help us clean up the CSS we get no errors, but several warnings:
For example, as explained at W3Schools.com, in CSS one can use shorthand margin and padding properties:
The
marginproperty is a shorthand property for the following individual margin properties:
margin-topmargin-rightmargin-bottommargin-left
CSS has properties for specifying the padding for each side of an element:
padding-toppadding-rightpadding-bottompadding-left
…so one wonders why Firefox Dev Tools don’t spit those out with that order and give them in bottom, left, right and top order instead.
Also instead of 0px, one is suggested to always write 0 instead, since zero will always be zero irrespective of the CSS units used for it (at least for the currently available CSS unit systems that is). This is merely to save in bandwidth I think, since 0px is better, suggesting to anyone modifying this value in the future they’d better use “px” [pixels] instead of say “pt” [points]).
So we clean up this CSS into (pay attention to the order of values in margin and padding shorthand declarations, which is top, right, bottom, left, that is clockwise starting from the top side of the HTML elements targeted via the CSS rule selector, which is a paragram – p – in our case):
p {
color: #333;
font-family: "Open Sans",sans-serif;
font-size: 14px;
font-weight: 400;
letter-spacing: 0;
line-height: 24px;
margin: 0 0 20px 0;
padding: 0 0 10px 0;}
Pasting at CSS LINT online tool again we get no warnings anymore (apart from no errors):
One might also remove the redundant space chars at the end of each line that Firefox places when copy-pasting the style declarations. Notepad++ can do it via Edit / Blank Operations / Trim Trailing Space menu command:
HowTo: Tell IE to use compatibility mode without editing your web pages
one reads:
We are using Telerik’s rich text editor (RadEditor), and it seems that RadEditor has specific behaviour regarding insertion of break tags.
To circumvent this issue please try to add host header in ISS 7 (website level):
Name = "X-UA-Compatible"
Value = "IE=EmulateIE10"Or, you can insert Html Meta tag on a PreRender event (of Page that uses RadEditor):
HtmlMeta meta =newHtmlMeta();
meta.Attributes.Add("http-equiv","X-UA-Compatible");
meta.Attributes.Add("content","IE=EmulateIE10");
Page.Header.Controls.Add(meta);
This is a very handy trick, one can open up a website at IIS console and open HTTP Response Headers node and then add the Name / Value pair X-UA-Compatible / IE=EmulateIE10 to force say Internet Explorer 11 to behave like Internet Explorer 10
To confirm it works, press F12 to show developer tools in IE11 and see at the right that it says “IE10” instead of “Edge” at the HTML engine selection dropdown list (compatibility mode).
Gotcha: JS replace on document.location fails, use document location.href
This is my contribution to:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2652816/what-is-the-difference-between-document-location-href-and-document-location
Here is an example of the practical significance of the difference and how it can bite you if you don’t realize it (document.location being an object and document.location.href being a string):
We use MonoX Social CMS (http://mono-software.com) free version at http://social.ClipFlair.net and we wanted to add the language bar WebPart at some pages to localize them, but at some others (e.g. at discussions) we didn’t want to use localization. So we made two master pages to use at all our .aspx (ASP.net) pages, in the first one we had the language bar WebPart and the other one had the following script to remove the /lng/el-GR etc. from the URLs and show the default (English in our case) language instead for those pages
<script>
var curAddr = document.location; //MISTAKE
var newAddr = curAddr.replace(new RegExp("/lng/[a-z]{2}-[A-Z]{2}", "gi"), "");
if (curAddr != newAddr)
document.location = newAddr;
</script>But this code isn’t working, replace function just returns Undefined (no exception thrown) so it tries to navigate to say x/lng/el-GR/undefined instead of going to url x. Checking it out with Mozilla Firefox’s debugger (F12 key) and moving the cursor over the curAddr variable it was showing lots of info instead of some simple string value for the URL. Selecting Watch from that popup you could see in the watch pane it was writing "Location -> …" instead of "…" for the url. That made me realize it was an object
One would have expected replace to throw an exception or something, but now that I think of it the problem was that it was trying to call some non-existent "replace" method on the URL object which seems to just give back "undefined" in Javascript.
The correct code in that case is:
<script>
var curAddr = document.location.href; //CORRECT
var newAddr = curAddr.replace(new RegExp("/lng/[a-z]{2}-[A-Z]{2}", "gi"), "");
if (curAddr != newAddr)
document.location = newAddr;
</script>HowTo: Quickly test a webpage in different Internet Explorer versions
I just noticed that on Internet Explorer 11 developer tools console (appears when you press F12 key), there is a drop-down where you can select the rendering engine used. Edge means the very latest (IE11 one in this case) and you can select back to version 5.
Interestingly, there is no version 6 in the dropdown, don’t remember if there was an IE6 or if they jumped from IE5.5 or something to IE7 directly.
George Birbilis @zoomicon 