Re: Scope of :hover

Boris wrote on Tuesday, June 3, 2003 at 9:10:50 PM:

> John Lewis wrote:

>> A possible variant is letting :hover and *:hover apply only to
>> certain elements similar to Win IE (so they will be identical
>> selectors), but still letting h1:hover apply to h1 elements.

> This is what Mozilla does, in quirks mode. In standards mode, :hover
> and *:hover apply to everything.

> Out of curiousity, is the Opera behavior you described the same in
> quirks and standards mode?

Correction: Opera 7.11 in fact treats :hover and *:hover identically,
in a manner similar to Win IE. Sorry about the snafu. Opera behaves
the same in quirks and standards mode.

(I'm not sure if I was just plain wrong or if Opera's behavior changed
from version to version, but let's go with just plain wrong unless
someone says otherwise.)

What Mozilla does is probably an even better idea. If CSS explicitly
says to let :hover apply to anything, which is ideal except for its
real world problems, or remains as is, which is decent except for the
ambiguity, browsers in standards mode can follow the spec for the
minority of pages where it may be useful, and those same UAs in
"quirks mode" can follow Win IE's example. Neophyte and advanced
authors get what they want, and legacy pages have a good chance of
behaving decently.

-- 
John Lewis

Received on Wednesday, 4 June 2003 00:47:50 UTC