Re: Viewport scrolling to reach overflow from root element [Was: Re: Shadows vs. layout]

On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 8:35 AM, Anton Prowse<prowse@moonhenge.net> wrote:
> Robert O'Callahan wrote:
>> On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 3:25 PM, Brad Kemper <brad.kemper@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>> On Aug 3, 2009, at 4:08 PM, David Hyatt wrote:
>>> In fact Web sites even deliberately hide elements offscreen using
>>> large negative left/top values, so we couldn't scroll to reveal
>>> this stuff at this point even if we wanted to. :)
>>>
>>>
>>> I could be wrong, but I thought we used to be able to do that on
>>> the right also a few years ago, and then that got "fixed".
>>
>> You've never been able to do it on the right, at least not in Gecko.
>>
>> Note that doing it on the left stuffs up accessibility. It really
>> shouldn't be done at all.
>
> Whilst I fully agree, the irony is that "accessibility" is usually the
> reason for using this "off-screen" technique in the first place!  It used to
> be well known that certain screen readers would ignore content which was set
> to display:none but read out content that was hidden with more ingenuity,
> hence the proliferation of techniques such as "positioning off left/top" to
> hide semantically useful yet visually unnecessary section titles etc.
>  Personally I prefer to zero each component of the box model and then set
> position:absolute;overflow:hidden;
> since this approach works "as specified" and makes no assumptions as to
> browser-specific behaviour.
>
> However, I very much wonder whether this issue is still relevant (if it ever
> was), or whether it'll be one of those folkloric practices which continue
> for years after the affected UAs are dead and buried.

I don't know whether or not it's still relevant (I've stopped doing
it, myself, in favor of practices that more directly lean on
accessibility features), but I'm quite certain that the practice'll
persist for years to come.

~TJ

Received on Tuesday, 4 August 2009 14:55:29 UTC