- From: Jonathan Chetwynd <j.chetwynd@btinternet.com>
- Date: Fri, 17 Jan 2003 06:40:36 +0000
- To: Joe Clark <joeclark@joeclark.org>
- Cc: WAI-IG <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
How long did it take that to cross the pond?
a UK friend of mine had a california licence plate so-named 'I W**K'
maybe 20 years ago
Jonathan
On Wednesday, January 15, 2003, at 08:08 PM, Joe Clark wrote:
>
>> Or the CSS equivalent of providing :focus and :hover rules.
>>
>> a:focus, a:hover { background-color: yellow }
>
> Oh, but it gets better!
>
> Eric Meyer and I had written, in research for my book:
>
>>>> So what it comes down to is a question of which states should
>>>> take precedence over others. Is focus more "necessary" than hover,
>>>> or active? That's really what I was asking you, as an
>>>> accessibility guru, to answer.
>>>
>>> I would say yes. You need to be able to tell where the focus is.
>>> That may necessitate making the focus state big-arse ugly so it can
>>> be spotted easily.
>>
>> Right, but what if the focus style (for the sake of argument) is
>> just a color change. I know it should be more, but let's say it's
>> just that. Is it okay to put that style in the middle of the stack,
>> and have the hover and active styles override it during those events?
>> For example:
>>
>> a:focus {color: lime;}
>> a:hover {color: red;}
>> a:active {color: yellow;}
>>
>> So a focused link would be lime (ick). When the user hovers it,
>> assuming they're using a mouse or other pointing device, it will
>> switch to red, but then when they move away it will go back to lime.
>> Similarly, the link will be yellow for the duration of the "click"
>> (or other activating action) and then should go back to lime.
>>
>> A slightly more realistic example:
>>
>> a:focus {border: 2px dotted red;}
>> a:hover {border: 2px solid #F99;}
>> a:active {color: 2px solid red;}
>>
>> The same basic hierarchy of effects applies. Is it acceptable to
>> have the hover and active styles temporarily override the focus
>> style, or are there accessibility reasons to always have the focus
>> style visible no matter what else is happening? I guess that's my
>> real question.
>
> I have not quite figured this out myself. Further, you can add
> :visited to the mix. I actually have the following in some of my
> stylesheets:
>
> a:link
> a:visited
> a:hover
> a:focus
> a:visited:focus
>
> and I am not sure that is the actually correct order. I should ask
> Eric. You can also do a:visited:hover, which I have used a couple of
> times.
>
> Eric adds that the basic rationale is:
>
>> Specificity. And which effect you want to overrule which others. See
>> <http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/link-specificity.html> for the long
>> explanation. Let me know if it doesn't make sense.
>
> And yes, it's pretty much a wank to use JavaScript for these functions.
> --
>
> Joe Clark | joeclark@joeclark.org
> Accessibility <http://joeclark.org/access/>
> Weblogs and articles <http://joeclark.org/weblogs/>
> <http://joeclark.org/writing/> | <http://fawny.org/>
>
Received on Friday, 17 January 2003 01:39:05 UTC