links – CSS-Tricks

How to Safely Share Your Email Address on a Website

Lorenzo Bonannella — Thu, 06 Oct 2022 12:54:53 +0000

Spammers are a huge deal nowadays. If you want to share your contact information without getting overwhelmed by spam email you need a solution. I run into this problem a few months ago. While I was researching how to solve it, I found different interesting solutions. Only one of them was perfect for my needs.

In this article, I am going to show you how to easily protect your email address from spam bots with multiple solutions. It’s up to you to decide what technique fits your needs.

The traditional case

Let’s say that you have a website. You want to share your contact details, and you don’t want to share only your social links. The email address must be there. Easy, right? You type something like this:

Send me an Email

And then you style it according to your tastes.

Well, even if this solution works, it has a problem. It makes your email address available to literally everyone, including website crawlers and all sorts of spam bots. This means that your inbox can be flooded with tons of unwanted rubbish like promotional offers or even some phishing campaign.

We are looking for a compromise. We want to make it hard for bots to get our email addresses, but as simple as possible for normal users.

The solution is obfuscation.

Obfuscation is the practice of making something difficult to understand. This strategy is used with source code for multiple reasons. One of them is hiding the purpose of the source code to make tampering or reverse-engineering more difficult. We will first look at different solutions that are all based on the idea of obfuscation.

The HTML approach

We can think of bots as software that browse the web and crawl through web pages. Once a bot obtains an HTML document, it interprets the content in it and extracts information. This extraction process is called web scraping. If a bot is looking for a pattern that matches the email format, we can try to disguise it by using a different format. For example, we could use HTML comments:

If you want to get in touch, please drop me an email at email@address.com

It looks messy, but the user will see the email address like this:

If you want to get in touch, please drop me an email at email@address.com

Pros:

Easy to set up.
It works with JavaScript disabled.
It can be read by assistive technology.

Cons:

Spam bots can skip known sequences like comments.
It doesn’t work with a mailto: link.

The HTML & CSS approach

What if we use the styling power of CSS to remove some content placed only to fool spam bots? Let’s say that we have the same content as before, but this time we place a span element inside:

If you want to get in touch, please drop me an email at PLEASE GO AWAY! email@address.com
.

Then, we use the following CSS style rule:

span.blockspam {
  display: none;
}

The final user will only see this:

If you want to get in touch, please drop me an email at email@address.com.

…which is the content we truly care about.

Pros:

It works with JavaScript disabled.
It’s more difficult for bots to get the email address.
It can be read by assistive technology.

Con:

It doesn’t work with a mailto: link.

The JavaScript approach

In this example, we use JavaScript to make our email address unreadable. Then, when the page is loaded, JavaScript makes the email address readable again. This way, our users can get the email address.

The easiest solution uses the Base64 encoding algorithm to decode the email address. First, we need to encode the email address in Base64. We can use some websites like Base64Encode.org to do this. Type in your email address like this:

Then, click the button to encode. With these few lines of JavaScript we decode the email address and set the href attribute in the HTML link:

var encEmail = "ZW1haWxAYWRkcmVzcy5jb20=";
const form = document.getElementById("contact");
form.setAttribute("href", "mailto:".concat(atob(encEmail)));

Then we have to make sure the email link includes id="contact" in the markup, like this:

Send me an Email

We are using the atob method to decode a string of Base64-encoded data. An alternative is to use some basic encryption algorithm like the Caesar cipher, which is fairly straightforward to implement in JavaScript.

Pros:

It’s more complicated for bots to get the email address, especially if you use an encryption algorithm.
It works with a mailto: link.
It can be read by assistive technology.

Con:

JavaScript must be enabled on the browser, otherwise, the link will be empty.

The embedded form approach

Contact forms are everywhere. You certainly have used one of them at least once. If you want a way for people to directly contact you, one of the possible solutions is implementing a contact form service on your website.

Formspree is one example of service which provides you all the benefits of a contact form without worrying about server-side code. Wufoo is too. In fact, here is a bunch you can consider for handling contact form submissions for you.

The first step to using any form service is to sign up and create an account. Pricing varies, of course, as do the features offered between services. But one thing most of them do is provide you with an HTML snippet to embed a form you create into any website or app. Here’s an example I pulled straight from a form I created in my Formspring account


   Your email:
    
  
   Your message:

In the first line, you should customize action based on your endpoint. This form quite basic, but you can add as many fields as you wish.

Notice the hidden input tag on line 9. This input tag helps you filter the submissions made by regular users and bots. In fact, if Formspree’s back-end sees a submission with that input filled, it will discard it. A regular user wouldn’t do that, so it must be a bot.

Pros:

Your email address is safe since it is not public.
It works with Javascript disabled.

Con:

Relies on a third-party service (which may be a pro, depending on your needs)

There is one other disadvantage to this solution but I left it out of the list since it’s quite subjective and it depends on your use case. With this solution, you are not sharing your email address. You are giving people a way to contact you. What if people want to email you? What if people are looking for your email address, and they don’t want a contact form? A contact form may be a heavy-handed solution in that sort of situation.

Conclusion

We reached the end! In this tutorial, we talked about different solutions to the problem of online email sharing. We walked through different ideas, involving HTML code, JavaScript and even some online services like Formspree to build contact forms. At the end of this tutorial, you should be aware of all the pros and cons of the strategies shown. Now, it’s up to you to pick up the most suitable one for the your specific use case.

How to Safely Share Your Email Address on a Website originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Cool Hover Effects That Use Background Properties

Temani Afif — Wed, 27 Apr 2022 14:20:07 +0000

A while ago, Geoff wrote an article about a cool hover effect. The effect relies on a combination of CSS pseudo-elements, transforms, and transitions. A lot of comments have shown that the same effect can be done using background properties. Geoff mentioned that was his initial thought and that’s what I was thinking as well. I am not saying the pseudo-element he landed on is bad, but knowing different methods to achieve the same effect can only be a good thing.

Cool Hover Effects series:

Cool Hover Effects That Use Background Properties (you are here!)
Cool Hover Effects That Use CSS Text Shadow
Cool Hover Effects That Use Background Clipping, Masks, and 3D

In this post, we will re-work that hover effect, but also expand it into other types of hover effects that only use CSS background properties.

CodePen Embed Fallback

You can see the background properties at work in that demo, as well as how we can use custom properties and the calc() function to do even more. We are going to learn how to combine all of these so we are left with nicely optimized code!

Hover effect #1

CodePen Embed Fallback

Let’s start with the first effect which is the reproduction of the one detailed by Geoff in his article. The code used to achieve that effect is the following:

.hover-1 {
  background: linear-gradient(#1095c1 0 0) var(--p, 0) / var(--p, 0) no-repeat;
  transition: .4s, background-position 0s;
}
.hover-1:hover {
  --p: 100%;
  color: #fff;
}

If we omit the color transition (which is optional), we only need three CSS declarations to achieve the effect. You are probably surprised how small the code is, but you will see how we got there.

First, let’s start with a simple background-size transition:

CodePen Embed Fallback

We are animating the size of a linear gradient from 0 100% to 100% 100%. That means the width is going from 0 to 100% while the background itself remains at full height. Nothing complex so far.

Let’s start our optimizations. We first transform our gradient to use the color only once:

background-image: linear-gradient(#1095c1 0 0);

The syntax might look a bit strange, but we are telling the browser that one color is applied to two color stops, and that’s enough to define a gradient in CSS. Both color stops are 0, so the browser automatically makes the last one 100% and fills our gradient with the same color. Shortcuts, FTW!

With background-size, we can omit the height because gradients are full height by default. We can do a transition from background-size: 0 to background-size: 100%.

.hover-1 {
  background-image: linear-gradient(#1095c1 0 0);
  background-size: 0;
  background-repeat: no-repeat;
  transition: .4s;
}
.hover-1:hover {
  background-size: 100%;
}

Let’s introduce a custom property to avoid the repetition of background-size:

.hover-1 {
  background-image: linear-gradient(#1095c1 0 0);
  background-size: var(--p, 0%);
  background-repeat: no-repeat;
  transition: .4s;
}
.hover-1:hover {
  --p: 100%;
}

We are not defining --p initially, so the fallback value (0% in our case) will be used. On hover, we define a value that replaces the fallback one ( 100%).

Now, let’s combine all the background properties using the shorthand version to get:

.hover-1 {
  background: linear-gradient(#1095c1 0 0) left / var(--p, 0%) no-repeat;
  transition: .4s;
}
.hover-1:hover {
  --p: 100%;
}

We are getting closer! Note that I have introduced a left value (for the background-position) which is mandatory when defining the size in the background shorthand. Plus, we need it anyway to achieve our hover effect.

We need to also update the position on hover. We can do that in two steps:

Increase the size from the right on mouse hover.
Decrease the size from the left on mouse out.

To do this, we need to update the background-position on hover as well:

CodePen Embed Fallback

We added two things to our code:

A background-position value of right on hover
A transition-duration of 0s on the background-position

This means that, on hover, we instantly change the background-position from left (see, we needed that value!) to right so the background’s size will increase from the right side. Then, when the mouse cursor leaves the link, the transition plays in reverse, from right to left, making it appear that we are decreasing the background’s size from the left side. Our hover effect is done!

But you said we only needed three declarations and there are four.

That’s true, nice catch. The left and right values can be changed to 0 0 and 100% 0, respectively; and since our gradient is already full height by default, we can get by using 0 and 100%.

.hover-1 {
  background: linear-gradient(#1095c1 0 0) 0 / var(--p, 0%) no-repeat;
  transition: .4s, background-position 0s;
}
.hover-1:hover {
  --p: 100%;
  background-position: 100%;
}

See how background-position and --p are using the same values? Now we can reduce the code down to three declarations:

.hover-1 {
  background: linear-gradient(#1095c1 0 0) var(--p, 0%) / var(--p,0%) no-repeat;
  transition: .4s, background-position 0s;
}
.hover-1:hover {
  --p: 100%;
}

The custom property --p is defining both the background position and size. On hover, It will update both of them as well. This is a perfect use case showing how custom properties can help us reduce redundant code and avoid writing properties more than once. We define our setting using custom properties and we only update the latter on hover.

But the effect Geoff described is doing the opposite, starting from left and ending at right. How do we do that when it seems we cannot rely on the same variable?

We can still use one variable and update our code slightly to achieve the opposite effect. What we want is to go from 100% to 0% instead of 0% to 100%. We have a difference of 100% that we can express using calc(), like this:

.hover-1 {
  background: linear-gradient(#1095c1 0 0) calc(100% - var(--p,0%)) / var(--p,0%) no-repeat;
  transition: .4s, background-position 0s;
}
.hover-1:hover {
  --p: 100%;
}

--p will change from 0% to 100%, but the background’s position will change from 100% to 0%, thanks to calc().

We still have three declarations and one custom property, but a different effect.

CodePen Embed Fallback

Before we move to the next hover effect, I want to highlight something important that you have probably noticed. When dealing with custom properties, I am using 0% (with a unit) instead of a unit-less 0. The unit-less zero may work when the custom property is alone, but will fail inside calc() where we need to explicitly define the unit. I may need another article to explain this quirk but always remember to add the unit when dealing with custom properties. I have two answers on StackOverflow (here and here) that go into more detail.

Hover effect #2

CodePen Embed Fallback

We need a more complex transition for this effect. Let’s take a look at a step-by-step illustration to understand what is happening.

Initially, a fixed-height, full-width gradient is outside of view. Then we move the gradient to the right to cover the bottom side. Finally, we increase the size of the gradient from the fixed height to 100% to cover the whole element.

We first have a background-position transition followed by a background-size one. Let’s translate this into code:

.hover-2 {
  background-image: linear-gradient(#1095c1 0 0);
  background-size: 100% .08em; /* .08em is our fixed height; modify as needed. */
  background-position: /* ??? */;
  background-repeat: no-repeat;
  transition: background-size .3s, background-position .3s .3s;
}
.hover-2:hover {
  transition: background-size .3s .3s, background-position .3s;
  background-size: 100% 100%;
  background-position: /* ??? */;
}

Note the use of two transition values. On hover, we need to first change the position and later the size, which is why we are adding a delay to the size. On mouse out, we do the opposite.

The question now is: what values do we use for background-position? We left those blank above. The background-size values are trivial, but the ones for background-position are not. And if we keep the actual configuration we’re unable to move our gradient.

Our gradient has a width equal to 100%, so we cannot use percentage values on background-position to move it.

Percentage values used with background-position are always a pain especially when you use them for the first time. Their behavior is non-intuitive but well defined and easy to understand if we get the logic behind it. I think it would take another article for a full explanation why it works this way, but here’s another “long” explanation I posted over at Stack Overflow. I recommend taking a few minutes to read that answer and you will thank me later!

The trick is to change the width to something different than 100%. Let’s use 200%. We’re not worried about the background exceeding the element because the overflow is hidden anyway.

.hover-2 {
  background-image: linear-gradient(#1095c1 0 0);
  background-size: 200% .08em;
  background-position: 200% 100%;
  background-repeat: no-repeat;
  transition: background-size .3s, background-position .3s .3s;
}
.hover-2:hover {
  transition: background-size .3s .3s, background-position .3s;
  background-size: 200% 100%;
  background-position: 100% 100%;
}

And here’s what we get:

CodePen Embed Fallback

It’s time to optimize our code. If we take the ideas we learned from the first hover effect, we can use shorthand properties and write fewer declarations to make this work:

.hover-2 {
  background: 
    linear-gradient(#1095c1 0 0) no-repeat
    var(--p, 200%) 100% / 200% var(--p, .08em);
  transition: .3s var(--t, 0s), background-position .3s calc(.3s - var(--t, 0s));
}
.hover-2:hover {
  --p: 100%;
  --t: .3s;
}

We add all the background properties together using the shorthand version then we use --p to express our values. The sizes change from .08em to 100% and the position from 200% to 100%

I am also using another variable --t , to optimize the transition property. On mouse hover we have it set to a .3s value, which gives us this:

transition: .3s .3s, background-position .3s 0s;

On mouse out, --t is undefined, so the fallback value will be used:

transition: .3s 0s, background-position .3s .3s;

Shouldn’t we have background-size in the transition?

That is indeed another optimization we can make. If we don’t specify any property it means “all” the properties, so the transition is defined for “all” the properties (including background-size and background-position). Then it’s defined again for background-position which is similar to defining it for background-size, then background-position.

“Similar” is different than saying something is the “same.” You will see a difference if you change more properties on hover, so the last optimization might be unsuitable in some cases.

Can we still optimize the code and use only one custom property?

Yes, we can! Ana Tudor shared a great article explaining how to create DRY switching where one custom property can update multiple properties. I won’t go into the details here, but our code can be revised like this:

.hover-2 {
  background: 
    linear-gradient(#1095c1 0 0) no-repeat
    calc(200% - var(--i, 0) * 100%) 100% / 200% calc(100% * var(--i, 0) + .08em);
  transition: .3s calc(var(--i, 0) * .3s), background-position .3s calc(.3s - calc(var(--i, 0) * .3s));
}
.hover-2:hover {
  --i: 1;
}

The --i custom property is initially undefined, so the fallback value, 0, is used. On hover though, we replace 0 with 1. You can do the math for both cases and get the values for each one. You can see that variable as a “switch” that update all our values at once on hover.

Again, we’re back to only three declarations for a pretty cool hover effect!

CodePen Embed Fallback

Hover effect #3

We are going to use two gradients instead of one for this effect. We will see that combining multiple gradients is another way to create fancy hover effects.

Here’s a diagram of what we’re doing:

We initially have two gradients that overflow the element so that they are out of view. Each one has a fixed height and toes up half of the element’s width. Then we slide them into view to make them visible. The first gradient is placed at the bottom-left and the second one at the top-right. Finally, we increase the height to cover the whole element.

Here’s how that looks in CSS:

.hover-3 {
  background-image:
    linear-gradient(#1095c1 0 0),
    linear-gradient(#1095c1 0 0);
  background-repeat: no-repeat;
  background-size: 50% .08em;
  background-position:
    -100% 100%,
    200% 0;
  transition: background-size .3s, background-position .3s .3s;
}
.hover-3:hover {
  background-size: 50% 100%;
  background-position:
    0 100%,
    100% 0;  
  transition: background-size .3s .3s, background-position .3s;
}

The code is almost the same as the other hover effects we’ve covered. The only difference is that we have two gradients with two different positions. The position values may look strange but, again, that’s related to how percentages work with the background-position property in CSS, so I highly recommend reading my Stack Overflow answer if you want to get into the gritty details.

Now let’s optimize! You get the idea by now — we’re using shorthand properties, custom properties, and calc() to tidy things up.

.hover-3 {
  --c: no-repeat linear-gradient(#1095c1 0 0);
  background: 
    var(--c) calc(-100% + var(--p, 0%)) 100% / 50% var(--p, .08em),
    var(--c) calc( 200% - var(--p, 0%)) 0    / 50% var(--p, .08em);
  transition: .3s var(--t, 0s), background-position .3s calc(.3s - var(--t, 0s));
}
.hover-3:hover {
  --p: 100%;
  --t: 0.3s;
}

I have added an extra custom property, --c, that defines the gradient since the same gradient is used in both places.

CodePen Embed Fallback

I am using 50.1% in that demo instead of 50% for the background size because it prevents a gap from showing between the gradients. I also added 1% to the positions for similar reasons.

Let’s do the second optimization by using the switch variable:

.hover-3 {
  --c: no-repeat linear-gradient(#1095c1 0 0);
  background: 
    var(--c) calc(-100% + var(--i, 0) * 100%) 100% / 50% calc(100% * var(--i, 0) + .08em),
    var(--c) calc( 200% - var(--i, 0) * 100%) 0 / 50% calc(100% * var(--i, 0) + .08em);
  transition: .3s calc(var(--i, 0) * .3s), background-position .3s calc(.3s - var(--i, 0) * .3s);
}
.hover-3:hover {
  --i: 1;
}

CodePen Embed Fallback

Are you started to see the patterns here? It’s not so much that the effects we’re making are difficult. It’s more the “final step” of code optimization. We start by writing verbose code with a lot of properties, then reduce it following simple rules (e.g. using shorthand, removing default values, avoiding redundant values, etc) to simplify things down as much as possible.

Hover effect #4

CodePen Embed Fallback

I will raise the difficulty level for this last effect, but you know enough from the other examples that I doubt you’ll have any issues with this one.

This hover effect relies on two conic gradients and more calculations.

Initially, we have both gradients with zero dimensions in Step 1. We increase the size of each one in Step 2. We keep increasing their widths until they fully cover the element, as shown in Step 3. After that, we slide them to the bottom to update their position. This is the “magic” part of the hover effect. Since both gradients will use the same coloration, changing their position in Step 4 will make no visual difference — but we will see a difference once we reduce the size on mouse out during Step 5.

If you compare Step 2 and Step 5, you can see that we have a different inclination. Let’s translate that into code:

.hover-4 {
  background-image:
    conic-gradient(/* ??? */),
    conic-gradient(/* ??? */);
  background-position:
    0 0,
    100% 0;
  background-size: 0% 200%;
  background-repeat: no-repeat;
  transition: background-size .4s, background-position 0s;
}
.hover-4:hover {
  background-size: /* ??? */ 200%;
  background-position:
    0 100%,
    100% 100%;
}

The positions are pretty clear. One gradient starts at top left (0 0) and ends at bottom left (0 100%) while the other starts at top right (100% 0) and ends at bottom right (100% 100%).

We’re using a transition on the background positions and sizes to reveal them. We only need a transition value for the background-size. And like before, background-position needs to change instantly, so we’re assigning a 0s value for the transition’s duration.

For the sizes, both gradient need to have 0 width and twice the element height (0% 200%). We will see later how their sizes change on hover. Let’s first define the gradient configuration.

The diagram below illustrates the configuration of each gradient:

Note that for the second gradient (indicated in green), we need to know the height to use it inside the conic-gradient we’re creating. For this reason, I am going to add a line-height that sets the element’s height and then try that same value for the conic gradient values we left out.

.hover-4 {
  --c: #1095c1;
  line-height: 1.2em;
  background-image:
    conic-gradient(from -135deg at 100%  50%, var(--c) 90deg, #0000 0),
    conic-gradient(from -135deg at 1.2em 50%, #0000 90deg, var(--c) 0);
  background-position:
    0 0,
    100% 0;
  background-size: 0% 200%;
  background-repeat: no-repeat;
  transition: background-size .4s, background-position 0s;
}
.hover-4:hover {
  background-size: /* ??? */ 200%;
  background-position:
    0 100%,
    100% 100%;
}

The last thing we have left is to figure out the background’s size. Intuitively, we may think that each gradient needs to take up half of the element’s width but that’s actually not enough.

We’re left with a large gap if we use 50% as the background-size value for both gradients.

We get a gap equal to the height, so we actually need to do is increase the size of each gradient by half the height on hover for them to cover the whole element.

.hover-4:hover {
  background-size: calc(50% + .6em) 200%;
  background-position:
    0 100%,
    100% 100%;
}

Here’s what we get after optimizing them like the previous examples:

.hover-4 {
  --c: #1095c1;
  line-height: 1.2em;
  background:
    conic-gradient(from -135deg at 100%  50%, var(--c) 90deg, #0000 0) 
      0  var(--p, 0%) / var(--s, 0%) 200% no-repeat,
    conic-gradient(from -135deg at 1.2em 50%, #0000 90deg, var(--c) 0) 
      100% var(--p, 0%) / var(--s, 0%) 200% no-repeat;
  transition: .4s, background-position 0s;
}
.hover-4:hover {
  --p: 100%;
  --s: calc(50% + .6em);
}

CodePen Embed Fallback

What about the version with only one custom property?

I will leave that for you! After looking at four similar hover effects, you should be able to get the final optimization down to a single custom property. Share your work in the comment section! There’s no prize, but we may end up with different implementations and ideas that benefit everyone!

Before we end, let me share a version of that last hover effect that Ana Tudor cooked up. It’s an improvement! But note that it lacks Firefox supports due to a known bug. Still, it’s a great idea that shows how to combine gradients with blend modes to create even cooler hover effects.

CodePen Embed Fallback

Wrapping up

We made four super cool hover effects! And even though they are different effects, they all take the same approach of using CSS background properties, custom properties, and calc(). Different combinations allowed us to make different versions, all using the same techniques that leave us with clean, maintainable code.

If you want to get some ideas, I made a collection of 500 (yes, 500!) hover effects, 400 of which are done without pseudo-elements. The four we covered in this article are just the tip of the iceberg!

Cool Hover Effects That Use Background Properties originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

6 Creative Ideas for CSS Link Hover Effects

Harshil Patel — Tue, 15 Feb 2022 15:37:04 +0000

Creating CSS link hover effects can add a bit of flair to an otherwise bland webpage. If you’ve ever found yourself stumped trying to make a slick hover effect, then I have six CSS effects for you to take and use for your next project.

Let’s get right to it!

I know we’re talking about :hover and all, but it can sometimes (but maybe not always) be a good idea lump :focus in as well, as not all interactions are directly from a mouse, but perhaps a tap or keystroke.

The Sliding Highlight Link Hover Effect

This effect applies a box shadow to the inline link, altering the color of the link text in the process. We start with padding all around the link, then add a negative margin of the same value to prevent the padding from disrupting the text flow.

We will use box-shadow instead of the background property since it allows us to transition.

a {
  box-shadow: inset 0 0 0 0 #54b3d6;
  color: #54b3d6;
  margin: 0 -.25rem;
  padding: 0 .25rem;
  transition: color .3s ease-in-out, box-shadow .3s ease-in-out;
}
a:hover {
  box-shadow: inset 100px 0 0 0 #54b3d6;
  color: white;
}

CodePen Embed Fallback

The Text Swappin’ Link Hover Effect

Here’s a fun one where we swap the text of the link with some other text on hover. Hover over the text and the linked text slides out as new text slides in.

Easier to show than tell.

There’s quite a bit of trickery happening in this link hover effect. But the magic sauce is using a data-attribute to define the text that slides in and call it with the content property of the link’s ::after pseudo-element.

First off, the HTML markup:

Hover get a link

That’s a lot of inline markup, but you’re looking at a paragraph tag that contains a link and a span.

Let’s give link some base styles. We need to give it relative positioning to hold the pseudo-elements — which will be absolutely positioned — in place, make sure it’s displayed as inline-block to get box element styling affordances, and hide any overflow the pseudo-elements might cause.

a {
  overflow: hidden;
  position: relative;
  display: inline-block;
}

The ::before and ::after pseudo-elements should have some absolute positioning so they stack with the actual link. We’ll make sure they are set to the link’s full width with a zero offset in the left position, setting them up for some sliding action.

a::before,
a::after {
 content: '';
  position: absolute;
  width: 100%;
  left: 0;
}

The ::after pseudo-element gets the content from the link’s data-attribute that’s in the HTML markup:

a::after {
  content: attr(data-replace);
}

Now we can transform: translate3d() the ::after pseudo-element element to the right by 200%. We move it back into position on :hover. While we’re at it, we can give this a zero offset n the top direction. This’ll be important later when we use the ::before pseudo-element like an underline below the text.

a::after {
  content: attr(data-replace);
  top: 0;
  transform-origin: 100% 50%;
  transform: translate3d(200%, 0, 0);
}

a:hover::after,
a:focus::after {
  transform: translate3d(0, 0, 0);
}

We’re also going to transform: scale() the ::before pseudo-element so it’s hidden by default, then scale it back up on :hover. We’ll make it small, like 2px in height, and pin it to the bottom so it looks like an underline on the text that swaps in with ::after.

a::before {
  background-color: #54b3d6;
  height: 2px;
  bottom: 0;
  transform-origin: 100% 50%;
  transform: scaleX(0);
}

a:hover::before,
a:focus::before {
  transform-origin: 0% 50%;
  transform: scaleX(1);
}

The rest is all preference! We drop in a transition on the transform effects, some colors, and whatnot to get the full effect. Those values are totally up to you.

CodePen Embed Fallback

View full CSS

Why are hyperlinks blue?

Chris Coyier — Mon, 14 Feb 2022 20:13:31 +0000

Last year, Elise Blanchard did some great historical research and discovered that blue hyperlinks replaced black hyperlinks in 1993. They’ve been blue for so long now that the general advice I always hear is to keep them that way. There is powerful societal muscle memory for “blue text is a clickable link.”

BUT WHY?!

On a hot tip, Elise kept digging and published a follow-up and identified the source of blue hyperlinks:

[…] it is Prof. Ben Shneiderman whom we can thank for the modern blue hyperlink.

But it didn’t start on the web. It was more about operating systems in the very early 1990s that started using blue for interactive components and highlighted text.

The decision to make hyperlinks blue in Mosaic, and the reason why we see it happening in Cello at the same time, is that by 1993, blue was becoming the industry standard for interaction for hypertext. It had been eight years since the initial research on blue as a hyperlink color. This data had been shared, presented at conferences, and printed in industry magazines. Hypertext went on to be discussed in multiple forums. Diverse teams’ research came to the same conclusion – color mattered. If it didn’t inspire Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina directly, it inspired those around them and those in their industry.

Because research:

[…] the blue hyperlink was indeed inspired by the research done at the University of Maryland.

To Shared Link — Permalink on CSS-Tricks

Why are hyperlinks blue? originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Adam Argyle’s Sick Mouse-Out CSS Hover Effect

Geoff Graham — Fri, 07 Jan 2022 20:15:19 +0000

I was killing some time browsing my CodePen feed for some eye candy and didn’t need to go past the first page before spotting a neat CSS hover effect by Adam Argyle.

I must’ve spent 10 minutes just staring at the demo in awe. There’s something about this that feels so app-like. I think it might be how contextually accurate it is in that the background color slides in from the left, then exits out through the right. It’s exactly the sort of behavior I’d expect from a mouse-in, mouse-out sort of interaction.

Whatever the case, I fired up a fresh pen and went to work recreating it. And it’s not super complex or anything, but rather a clever use of transitions and transforms paired with proper offsets. Quite elegant! I’m actually a little embarrassed how long it took me to realize how the mouse-out part works.

Here’s how I tackled it, warts and all.

“I bet that’s using a transition on a `background`.”

That was my first thought. Define the background-color, set the background-size and background-position, then transition the background-position. That’s how I’ve seen that “growing” background color thing done in the past. I’ve done that myself on some projects, like this:

CodePen Embed Fallback

If I could do the same thing, only from left-to-right, then all that’s left is the mouse-out, right? Nope. The problem is there’s nothing that can really make the background-position transition from left-to-right to left-to-right. I could make it do one or the other, but not both.

“Maybe it’s a `transform` instead.”

My next attempt was jump into transforms. The transform property provides a bunch of functions that can transition together for slightly more complex movement. For example, the background can “grow” or “shrink” by changing the element’s scale(). Or, in this case, just along the x-axis with scaleX().

But like I mentioned, there isn’t a way to isolate the element’s background to do that. Going from scaleX(0) to scaleX(1) scales the entire element, so that basically squishes the link — content and all — down to nothing, then stretches it back out to its natural size which is a totally different effect. Plus, it means starting with scaleX(0) which hides the whole dang thing by default making it unusable.

But a pseudo-element could work! It doesn’t matter if that gets squished or hidden because it isn’t part of the actual content. Gotta put the background on that instead and position it directly under the link.

a {
  /* Keeps the pseudo-element contained to the element */
  position: relative;
}

a::before {
  background: #ff9800;
  content: "";
  inset: 0; /* Logical equivalent to physical offsets */
  position: absolute;
  transform: scaleX(0); /* Hide by default */
  z-index: -1; /* Ensures the link is stacked on top */
}

“Now I need `::before` to change on hover.”

I knew I could make ::before scale from 0 to 1 by chaining it to the link element’s :hover state.

a:hover::before {
  transform: scaleX(1)
}

Nice! I was onto something.

CodePen Embed Fallback

Sprinkle a little transition fairy dust on it and things start to come to life.

a::before {
  background: #ff9800;
  content: "";
  inset: 0;
  position: absolute;
  transform: scaleX(0);
  transition: transform .5s ease-in-out;
  z-index: -1;
}

CodePen Embed Fallback

“Hmm, the transition moves in both directions.”

Again, this is where I sorta got stuck. Something in my head just wasn’t clicking for some reason. As per usual, I ran over to the CSS-Tricks Almanac to see what property might’ve slipped my mind.

Ah, yes. That would be transform-origin. That allows me to set where the transform starts, which is not totally dissimilar from setting the background-position like I tried earlier. The transform could start from the left instead of its default 50% 50% position.

a::before {
  background: #ff9800;
  content: "";
  inset: 0;
  position: absolute;
  transform: scaleX(0);
  transform-origin: left;
  transition: transform .5s ease-in-out;
  z-index: -1;
}

Yeah, like this:

CodePen Embed Fallback

I was already transitioning ::before to scaleX(1) on link hover. If I reversed the transform-origin from left to right at the same time, then mayyyybe the highlight goes out the opposite of how it came in when the mouse exits?

a:hover::before {
  transform: scaleX(1);
  transform-origin: right;
}

🤞

CodePen Embed Fallback

Whoops, backwards! Let’s swap the left and right values. 🙃

CodePen Embed Fallback

Gorgeous. Thank you, Adam, for the inspiration!

Adam Argyle’s Sick Mouse-Out CSS Hover Effect originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

CSS Underlines Are Too Thin and Too Low in Chrome

Šime Vidas — Tue, 04 Jan 2022 15:30:18 +0000

I’ve encountered two bugs in Chrome while testing the new CSS text-decoration-thickness and text-underline-offset properties, and I want to share them with you here in this article.

Default underlines are inconsistent
Luckily, we can override the browsers’ defaults
Chrome bug 1: Underlines are too thin on macOS
Chrome bug 2: Underlines are too low
Help prioritize the Chrome bugs

First, let’s acknowledge one thing:

Default underlines are inconsistent

Let’s add a text link to a plain web page, set its font-family to Arial, and compare the underlines across browsers and operating systems.

From left to right: Chrome, Safari, and Firefox on macOS; Safari on iOS; Chrome, and Firefox on Windows; Chrome, and Firefox on Android.

As you can see, the default underline is inconsistent across browsers. Each browser chooses their own default thickness and vertical position (offset from the baseline) for the underline. This is in line with the CSS Text Decoration module, which specifies the following default behavior (auto value):

The user agent chooses an appropriate thickness for text decoration lines. […] The user agent chooses an appropriate offset for underlines.

Luckily, we can override the browsers’ defaults

There are two new, widely supported CSS properties that allow us to precisely define the thickness and offset for our underlines:

With these properties, we can create consistent underlines even across two very different browsers, such as the Gecko-based Firefox on Android and the WebKit-based Safari on macOS.

h1 {
  text-decoration: underline;
  text-decoration-thickness: 0.04em;
  text-underline-offset: 0.03em;
}

Top row: the browsers’ default underlines; bottom row: consistent underlines with CSS. (Demo)

Note: The text-decoration-thickness property also has a special from-font value that instructs browsers to use the font’s own preferred underline width, if available. I tested this value with a few different fonts, but the underlines were inconsistent.

OK, so let’s move on to the two Chrome bugs I noted earlier.

Chrome bug 1: Underlines are too thin on macOS

If you set the text-decoration-thickness property to a font-relative length value that computes to a non-integer pixel value, Chrome will “floor” that value instead of rounding it to the nearest integer. For example, if the declared thickness is 0.06em, and that computes to 1.92px, Chrome will paint a thickness of 1px instead of 2px. This issue is limited to macOS.

a {
  font-size: 2em; /* computes to 32px */
  text-decoration-thickness: 0.06em; /* computes to 1.92px */
}

In the following screenshot, notice how the text decoration lines are twice as thin in Chrome (third row) than in Safari and Firefox.

From top to bottom: Safari, Firefox, and Chrome on macOS. (Demo)

For more information about this bug, see Chromium issue #1255280.

Chrome bug 2: Underlines are too low

The text-underline-offset property allows us to precisely set the distance between the alphabetic baseline and the underline (the underline’s offset from the baseline). Unfortunately, this feature is currently not implemented correctly in Chrome and, as a result, the underline is positioned too low.

h1 {
  text-decoration: underline;
  text-decoration-color: #f707;

  /* disable “skip ink” */
  -webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; /* Safari */
  text-decoration-skip-ink: none;

  /* cover the entire descender */
  text-decoration-thickness: 0.175em; /* descender height */
  text-underline-offset: 0; /* no offset from baseline */
}

Because of this bug, it is not possible to move the underline all the way up to the baseline in Chrome.

From left to right: Safari, Firefox, and Chrome on macOS. View this demo on CodePen.

For more information about this bug, see Chromium issue #1172623.

Note: As you might have noticed from the image above, Safari draws underlines on top of descenders instead of beneath them. This is a WebKit bug that was fixed very recently. The fix should ship in the next version of Safari.

Help prioritize the Chrome bugs

The two new CSS properties for styling underlines are a welcome addition to CSS. Hopefully, the two related Chrome bugs will be fixed sooner rather than later. If these CSS features are important to you, make your voice heard by starring the bugs in Chromium’s bug tracker.

CSS Underlines Are Too Thin and Too Low in Chrome originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Buttons vs. Links

Chris Coyier — Mon, 01 Nov 2021 22:58:12 +0000

There are thousands of articles out there about buttons and links on the web; the differences and how to use them properly. Hey, I don’t mind. I wrote my own as well¹.

It’s such a common mistake on the web that it’s always worth repeating:

Is the intention to send someone to another URL? It’s a link in the form of .
Is it to trigger some on-page interactivity? It’s a button in the form of
Any devition from from those and you better smurfing know what you are doing.

Eric Eggert wrote a pretty good piece recently with a nice line about why it matters:

If you had a keyboard and your “e” key would only work 90% of the time, it would be infuriating. Reliability and trust in user interfaces is important to allow users to navigate content and application with ease. If you use the right elements, you support users.

Manuel Matuzović has a Button Cheat Sheet that is a lol-inducing ride about why literally everything other than a

On Browser-Specific URL Schemes

Chris Coyier — Tue, 26 Oct 2021 20:06:29 +0000

We’ve covered URL schemes:

A URL Scheme is like “http://…” or “ftp://…”. Those seem like a very low-level concept that you don’t have much control over, but actually, you do!

I’d call it non-trivial, but developers can register new URL schemes in apps that users install. Back in 2017, Microsoft Edge did this:

microsoft-edge://

If you use that, the behavior is to open the URL in Microsoft Edge — even if you’ve chosen a different default browser. So if I, as a blogger, wanted to essentially force you to use Edge for this site, I could, by starting every single URL with this URL scheme. I won’t, but I could. And so could Microsoft.

At the time, Daniel Aleksandersen wrote a program called EdgeDefelector to circumvent that behavior and explained:

I don’t hate Microsoft Edge — maybe you do! — but I do believe users who have bothered to configure a different default web browser should be allowed to keep using that default web browser.

This has come back into the public eye a bit as the Brave browser now supports the microsoft-edge:// URL scheme. Apparently, not only does an app need to register a URL scheme, but other apps that support clicks-on-links need to honor it too. Firefox is also thinking of adding it. I think the risk of not supporting the URL scheme is that clicks on links like that could do nothing instead of actually opening the URL.

A lot of the talk is about Windows 11. But here on my Mac, I see this URL scheme do what it intends across all these browsers.

Safari

Chrome

Firefox

Brave

Daniel goes further:

So, how did we get here? Until the release of iOS version 14 in September 2020, you couldn’t change the default web browser on iPhones and iPads. Google has many apps for iOS, including a shell for its Chrome browser. To tie all its apps together, Google introduced a googlechrome: URL scheme in February 2014. It could use these links to direct you from its Search or Mail app and over to Chrome instead of Apple’s Safari browser.

Here’s my iPhone 13 opening googlechrome://css-tricks.com with and without Google Chrome installed.

iOS Safari with Google Chrome installed

iOS Safari without Google Chrome installed

Seems like that would be Google’s sin, but it is apparently Apple that allowed it on iOS. Daniel once more:

The original sin was Apple’s, but Microsoft is gulping the juice of the apple with gusto.

I’m not as boned up on all this as I should be, but I think if I made software that was involved here, I’d be tempted to intercept these URL schemes and have them open in the browser the user is already in. The web is the web, there should be no reason any given URL has to open in any specific browser.

On Browser-Specific URL Schemes originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Application-Specific Links

Chris Coyier — Tue, 31 Aug 2021 14:30:21 +0000

You know like https:? That’s a URL Scheme. You’re probably familiar with the concept, thanks to others that come up in front-end development, like mailto:. You can actually make your own, which is pretty cool. There are a lot of them.

I find that custom URL schemes come up the most with apps that are both web apps and native apps. For example, two that I use nearly every day: Notion and Figma. I love that the things I work on in these apps have URLs. URLs for everything! 🎉

And yet. When I grab the URL to a Notion page, which I do regularly to share with co-workers, I get a URL like…

https://www.notion.so/csstricks/...

That’s fine, and works to open that Notion page in the browser. But I prefer Notion-the-native-app. It’s Electron, so it’s still a web app I guess, but I don’t use it from my web browser, I use it from the application Notion.app on my literal machine.

Geoff shared with me an article the other day that documents how easy it is to make an application’s browser URL open up in the native app instead:

Fortunately, Notion’s dev team thought about that, and built the notion:// link protocol. If you replace the https:// portion of any Notion page link with notion://, your link will automatically open within the native app instead of a web browser.
Thomas Frank, “How to Share Notion Links That Open Directly in the App”

That’s great that the native scheme is essentially the same as the web scheme, aside from the name. Thomas goes super deep on this with methods to alter the content of clipboard to replace Notion links with the custom scheme.

I just wanted to note a method I think works nicely for me. The trick isn’t to alter the links themselves, but to react to links that you know are Notion links by redirecting them to open in Notion.app.

The trick, on Macs, is Choosy:

I prefer to set up Choosy such that it never asks me what browser to use, it just does it based on rules. So under the settings, I have a bunch of apps set up:

For Notion, I watch for links to Notion, and have it open up Notion… that’s it!

The other apps basically do the exact same thing. Works great.

One caveat though! Once in a blue moon, I have to come in here and flip certain applications off. For example, a password reset flow might send me to slack.com or something, for a certain page as part of the flow that is only available through the web. If Choosy is doing its thing, it tries to force that page to open in Slack.app, which it won’t, and you can kinda get trapped. So, I have to come in here and flip it off temporarily.

Application-Specific Links originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

target=blank

Chris Coyier — Wed, 09 Jun 2021 14:37:31 +0000

Does that make your eye twitch a little bit? Like… it’s a typo. It should be target="_blank" with an underscore to start the value. As in…


  Open CodePen in a New Tab

Welp, that’s correct syntax!

In the case of the no-underscore target="blank", the blank part is just a name. It could be anything. It could be target="foo" or, perhaps to foreshadow the purpose here: target="open-new-links-in-this-space".

The difference:

target="_blank" is a special keyword that will open links in a new tab every time.
target="blank" will open the first-clicked link in a new tab, but any future links that share target="blank" will open in that same newly-opened tab.

I never knew this! I credit this tweet explanation.

I created a very basic demo page to show off the functionality (code). Watch as a new tab opens when I click the first link. Then, subsequent clicks from either also open tab open that link in that new second tab.

Why?

I think use cases here are few and far between. Heck, I’m not even that big of a fan of target="_blank". But here’s one I could imagine: documentation.

Say you’ve got a web app where people actively do work. It might make sense to open links to documentation from within that app in a new tab, so they aren’t navigating away from active work. But, maybe you think they don’t need a new tab for every documentation link. You could do like…


  View CodePen Documentation
 




  About Asset Hosting

target=blank originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Create a Tag Cloud with some Simple CSS and even Simpler JavaScript

Mark Conroy — Mon, 28 Dec 2020 14:24:15 +0000

I’ve always liked tag clouds. I like the UX of seeing what tags are most popular on a website by seeing the relative font size of the tags, popular tags being bigger. They seem to have fallen out of fashion, though you do often see versions of them used in illustrations in tools like Wordle.

How difficult is it to make a tag cloud? Not very difficult at all. Let’s see!

Let’s start with the markup

For our HTML, we’re going to put each of our tags into a list,

If your tag cloud is already in HTML, and you are just looking to do the relative font-size thing, that’s good! Progressive enhancement! You should be able to adapt the JavaScript later on so it does just that part, but not necessarily building and injecting the tags themselves.

I have mocked out some JSON with a certain amount of articles tagged with each property. Let’s write some JavaScript to go grab that JSON feed and do three things.

First, we’ll create an

from each entry for our list. Imagine the HTML, so far, is like this:
```
  align-content
  align-items
  align-self
  animation
  ...
  z-index
```
Second, we’ll put the number of articles each property has in parentheses beside inside each list item. So now, the markup is like this:
```
  align-content (2)
  align-items (2)
  align-self (2)
  animation (9)
  ...
  z-index (4)
```
Third, and last, we’ll create a link around each tag that goes to the correct place. This is where we can set the font-size property for each item depending on how many articles that property is tagged with, so animation that has 13 articles will be much bigger than background-color which only has one article.
```
  
    animation (9)
  
```
The JavasScript part

Let’s have a look at the JavaScript to do this.
```
const dataURL =
  "https://gist.githubusercontent.com/markconroy/536228ed416a551de8852b74615e55dd/raw/9b96c9049b10e7e18ee922b4caf9167acb4efdd6/tags.json";
const tags = document.querySelector(".tags");
const fragment = document.createDocumentFragment();
const maxFontSizeForTag = 6;

fetch(dataURL)
  .then(function (res) {
    return res.json();
  })
  .then(function (data) {
    // 1. Create a new array from data
    let orderedData = data.map((x) => x);
    // 2. Order it by number of articles each tag has
    orderedData.sort(function(a, b) {
      return a.tagged_articles.length - b.tagged_articles.length;
    });
    orderedData = orderedData.reverse();
    // 3. Get a value for the tag with the most articles
    const highestValue = orderedData[0].tagged_articles.length;
    // 4. Create a list item for each result from data.
    data.forEach((result) => handleResult(result, highestValue));
    // 5. Append the full list of tags to the tags element
    tags.appendChild(tag);
  });
```
The JavaScript above uses the Fetch API to fetch the URL where tags.json is hosted. Once it gets this data, it returns it as JSON. Here we seque into a new array called orderedData (so we don’t mutate the original array), find the tag with the most articles. We’ll use this value later on in a font-scale so all other tags will have a font-size relative to it. Then, forEach result in the response, we call a function I have named handleResult() and pass the result and the highestValue to this function as a parameter. It also creates:
- a variable called tags which is what we will use to inject each list item that we create from the results,
- a variable for a fragment to hold the result of each iteration of the loop, which we will later append to the tags, and
- a variable for the max font size, which we’ll use in our font scale later.
Next up, the handleResult(result) function:
```
function handleResult(result, highestValue) {
  const tag = document.createElement("li");
  tag.classList.add("tag");
  tag.innerHTML = `${result.title} (${result.tagged_articles.length})`;

  // Append each tag to the fragment
  fragment.appendChild(tag);
}
```
This is pretty simple function that creates a list element set to the variable named tag and then adds a .tag class to this list element. Once that’s created, it sets the innerHTML of the list item to be a link and populates the values of that link with values from the JSON feed, such as a result.href for the link to the tag. When each li is created, it’s then added as a string to the fragment, which we will later then append to the tags variable. The most important item here is the inline style tag that uses the number of articles—result.tagged_articles.length—to set a relative font size using em units for this list item. Later, we’ll change that value to a formula to use a basic font scale.

I find this JavaScript just a little bit ugly and hard on the eyes, so let’s create some variables and a simple font scale formula for each of our properties to tidy it up and make it easier to read.
```
function handleResult(result, highestValue) {
  // Set our variables
  const name = result.title;
  const link = result.href;
  const numberOfArticles = result.tagged_articles.length;
  let fontSize = numberOfArticles / highestValue * maxFontSizeForTag;
  fontSize = +fontSize.toFixed(2);
  const fontSizeProperty = `${fontSize}em`;

  // Create a list element for each tag and inline the font size
  const tag = document.createElement("li");
  tag.classList.add("tag");
  tag.innerHTML = `${name} (${numberOfArticles})`;
  
  // Append each tag to the fragment
  fragment.appendChild(tag);
}
```
By setting some variables before we get into creating our HTML, the code is a lot easier to read. And it also makes our code a little bit more DRY, as we can use the numberOfArticles variable in more than one place.

Once each of the tags has been returned in this .forEach loop, they are collected together in the fragment. After that, we use appendChild() to add them to the tags element. This means the DOM is manipulated only once, instead of being manipulated each time the loop runs, which is a nice performance boost if we happen to have a large number of tags.

Font scaling

What we have now will work fine for us, and we could start writing our CSS. However, our formula for the fontSize variable means that the tag with the most articles (which is “flex” with 25) will be 6em (25 / 25 * 6 = 6), but the tags with only one article are going to be 1/25th the size of that (1 / 25 * 6 = 0.24), making the content unreadable. If we had a tag with 100 articles, the smaller tags would fare even worse (1 / 100 * 6 = 0.06).

To get around this, I have added a simple if statement that if the fontSize that is returned is less than 1, set the fontSize to 1. If not, keep it at its current size. Now, all the tags will be within a font scale of 1em to 6em, rounded off to two decimal places. To increase the size of the largest tag, just change the value of maxFontSizeForTag. You can decide what works best for you based on the amount of content you are dealing with.
```
function handleResult(result, highestValue) {
  // Set our variables
  const numberOfArticles = result.tagged_articles.length;
  const name = result.title;
  const link = result.href;
  let fontSize = numberOfArticles / highestValue * maxFontSizeForTag;
  fontSize = +fontSize.toFixed(2);
  
  // Make sure our font size will be at least 1em
  if (fontSize <= 1) {
    fontSize = 1;
  } else {
    fontSize = fontSize;
  }
  const fontSizeProperty = `${fontSize}em`;
  
  // Then, create a list element for each tag and inline the font size.
  tag = document.createElement("li");
  tag.classList.add("tag");
  tag.innerHTML = `${name} (${numberOfArticles})`;

  // Append each tag to the fragment
  fragment.appendChild(tag);
}
```
Now the CSS!

We’re using flexbox for our layout since each of the tags can be of varying width. We then center-align them with justify-content: center, and remove the list bullets.
```
.tags {
  display: flex;
  flex-wrap: wrap;
  justify-content: center;
  max-width: 960px;
  margin: auto;
  padding: 2rem 0 1rem;
  list-style: none;
  border: 2px solid white;
  border-radius: 5px;
}
```
We’ll also use flexbox for the individual tags. This allows us to vertically align them with align-items: center since they will have varying heights based on their font sizes.
```
.tag {
  display: flex;
  align-items: center;
  margin: 0.25rem 1rem;
}
```
Each link in the tag cloud has a small bit of padding, just to allow it to be clickable slightly outside of its strict dimensions.
```
.tag__link {
  padding: 5px 5px 0;
  transition: 0.3s;
  text-decoration: none;
}
```
I find this is handy on small screens especially for people who might find it harder to tap on links. The initial text-decoration is removed as I think we can assume each item of text in the tag cloud is a link and so a special decoration is not needed for them.

I’ll just drop in some colors to style things up a bit more:
```
.tag:nth-of-type(4n+1) .tag__link {
  color: #ffd560;
}
.tag:nth-of-type(4n+2) .tag__link {
  color: #ee4266;
}
.tag:nth-of-type(4n+3) .tag__link {
  color: #9e88f7;
}
.tag:nth-of-type(4n+4) .tag__link {
  color: #54d0ff;
}
```
The color scheme for this was stolen directly from Chris’ blogroll, where every fourth tag starting at tag one is yellow, every fourth tag starting at tag two is red, every fourth tag starting at tag three is purple. and every fourth tag starting at tag four is blue.

We then set the focus and hover states for each link:
```
.tag:nth-of-type(4n+1) .tag__link:focus,
.tag:nth-of-type(4n+1) .tag__link:hover {
  box-shadow: inset 0 -1.3em 0 0 #ffd560;
}
.tag:nth-of-type(4n+2) .tag__link:focus,
.tag:nth-of-type(4n+2) .tag__link:hover {
  box-shadow: inset 0 -1.3em 0 0 #ee4266;
}
.tag:nth-of-type(4n+3) .tag__link:focus,
.tag:nth-of-type(4n+3) .tag__link:hover {
  box-shadow: inset 0 -1.3em 0 0 #9e88f7;
}
.tag:nth-of-type(4n+4) .tag__link:focus,
.tag:nth-of-type(4n+4) .tag__link:hover {
  box-shadow: inset 0 -1.3em 0 0 #54d0ff;
}
```
I could probably have created a custom variable for the colors at this stage—like --yellow: #ffd560, etc.—but decided to go with the longhand approach for IE 11 support. I love the box-shadow hover effect. It’s a very small amount of code to achieve something much more visually-appealing than a standard underline or bottom-border. Using em units here means we have decent control over how large the shadow would be in relation to the text it needed to cover.

OK, let’s top this off by setting every tag link to be black on hover:
```
.tag:nth-of-type(4n+1) .tag__link:focus,
.tag:nth-of-type(4n+1) .tag__link:hover,
.tag:nth-of-type(4n+2) .tag__link:focus,
.tag:nth-of-type(4n+2) .tag__link:hover,
.tag:nth-of-type(4n+3) .tag__link:focus,
.tag:nth-of-type(4n+3) .tag__link:hover,
.tag:nth-of-type(4n+4) .tag__link:focus,
.tag:nth-of-type(4n+4) .tag__link:hover {
  color: black;
}
```
And we’re done! Here’s the final result:

CodePen Embed Fallback

Create a Tag Cloud with some Simple CSS and even Simpler JavaScript originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Excluding Emojis From Transparent Text Clipping

Geoff Graham — Wed, 02 Sep 2020 18:22:04 +0000

CSS-Tricks has this pretty cool way of styling hovered links. By default, the text is a fairly common blue. But hover of the links, and they’re filled with a linear gradient.

😍

Pretty neat, right? And the trick isn’t all that complicated. On hover…

give the link a linear gradient background,
clip the background to the text, and
give the text a transparent fill so the background shows through.

It looks like this in CSS:

a {
  color: #007db5;
}

a:hover {
  background: linear-gradient(90deg,#ff8a00,#e52e71);
  -webkit-background-clip: text;
  -webkit-text-fill-color: transparent;
}

Notice the -webkit- prefix, which is required for now. There’s a little more to the actual implementation here on CSS-Tricks, but this little bit gets us what we’re looking for.

CodePen Embed Fallback

But that’s not the point here. Just the other day, Brad Westfall phoned in to let us know that this technique also takes effect on emojis which, like any other text, gets a transparent fill on hover.

CodePen Embed Fallback

He noticed it happening on a link in one of our posts.

Not the worst thing. And it totally makes sense. I mean, an emoji is a glyph like any other text in a font file, right? They just happen to be a color font and take on the form of an image. Of course they would be treated like any other glyph in a situation like this where we’re hallowing out the fill color.

But if keeping the color in tact on emojis is a requirement, that can be resolved by wrapping the emoji in a span and setting its fill back to its initial state.

CodePen Embed Fallback

But who wants to write a span every time an emoji happens to pop up in a link? 👎

If you’re looking for a CSS solution, we’re kinda out of luck. That said, the CSS Fonts Module Level 4 specification includes a definition for a proposed font-variation-emoji property. However, there’s not much on it (that I can find) at the moment and it doesn’t appear to be designed for this sort of thing, A quick skim of some discussion related to the proposal suggests it’s more about the way some browsers or systems automatically convert Unicode to emoji and how to control that behavior.

There’s also the proposed definition of font-palette in the same draft spec which seems like a way to control color fonts — that’s what emojis are at the end of the day. But this isn’t the solution, either.

It seems the only way to prevent an emoji’s fill from being changed without a span is some sort of JavaScript solution. Look at services like WordPress, Dropbox, Facebook and Twitter. They all implement their own custom emoji sets. And what do they use? Images.

Yeah, along with a lot of divs and such!

That would be one way to do it. If the emoji is replaced with an image (an SVG in this specific example), then that would certainly exclude it from being filled along with the link text.

CodePen Embed Fallback

Or, hey, why not prevent ourselves from getting into the situation at all and place that dang thing outside of the link?

CodePen Embed Fallback

That’s probably the route we should have taken all along. But an emoji might not come at the beginning or end of a link, but somewhere in the middle. It just underscores the point that there are cases where having some sort of control here could come in handy.

Excluding Emojis From Transparent Text Clipping originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

A CSS-only, animated, wrapping underline

Chris Coyier — Fri, 21 Aug 2020 21:33:05 +0000

Nicky Meuleman, inspired by Cassie Evans, details how they built the anchor link hover on their sites. When a link is hovered, another color underline kinda slides in with a gap between the two. Typical text-decoration doesn’t help here, so multiple backgrounds are used instead, and fortunately, it works with text that breaks across multiple lines as well.

CodePen Embed Fallback

To Shared Link — Permalink on CSS-Tricks

A CSS-only, animated, wrapping underline originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Block Links: The Search for a Perfect Solution

Vikas Parashar — Mon, 25 May 2020 19:58:40 +0000

I was reading this article by Chris where he talks about block links — you know, like wrapping an entire card element inside an anchor — being a bad idea. It’s bad accessibility because of how it affects screen readers. And it’s bad UX because it prevents simple user tasks, like selecting text.

But maybe there’s something else at play. Maybe it’s less an issue with the pattern than the implementation of it. That led me to believe that this is the time to write follow-up article to see if we can address some of the problems Chris pointed out.

Throughout this post, I’ll use the term “card” to describe a component using the block link pattern. Here’s what we mean by that.

CodePen Embed Fallback

Let’s see how we want our Card Components to work:

The whole thing should be linked and clickable.
It should be able to contain more than one link.
Content should be semantic so assistive tech can understand it.
The text should be selectable, like regular links.
Things like right-click and keyboard shortcuts should work with it
Its elements should be focusable when tabbing.

That’s a long list! And since we don’t have any standard card widget provided by the browser, we don’t have any standard guidelines to build it.

Like most things on the web, there’s more than one way to make a card component. However, I haven’t found something that checks all the requirements we just covered. In this article, we will try to hit all of them. That’s what we’re going to do now!

Method 1: Wrap everything an

This is the most common and the easiest way to make a linked card. Take the HTML for the card and wrap the entire thing in an anchor tag.

CodePen Embed Fallback

Here’s what that gives us:

It’s clickable.
It works with right-click and keyboard shortcuts.

Well, not great. We still can’t:

Put another link inside the card because the entire thing is a single link
Use it with a screen reader — the content is not semantic, so assistive technology will announce everything inside the card, starting from the time stamp
Select text

That’s enough 👎 that we probably shouldn’t use it. Let’s move onto the next technique.

Method 2: Just link what needs linking

This is a nice compromise that sacrifices a little UX for improved accessibility.

CodePen Embed Fallback

With this pattern we achieve most of our goals:

We can put as many links as we want.
Content is semantic.
We can select the text from Card.
Right Click and keyboard shortcuts work.
The focus is in proper order when tabbing.

But it is missing the main feature we want in a card: the whole thing should be clickable! Looks like we need to try some other way.

Method 3: The good ol’ ::before pseudo element

In this one, we add a ::before or ::after element, place it above the card with absolute positioning and stretch it over the entire width and height of the card so it’s clickable.

CodePen Embed Fallback

But now:

We still can’t add more than one link because anything else that’s linked is under the pseudo element layer. We can try to put all the text above the pseudo element, but card link itself won’t work when clicking on top of the text.
We still can’t select the text. Again, we could swap layers, but then we’re back to the clickable link issue all over again.

Let’s try to actually check all the boxes here in our final technique.

Method 4: Sprinkle JavaScript on the second method

Let’s build off the second method. Recall that’s what where we link up everything we want to be a link:


  Mar 20, 2020
  A Complete Guide to calc() in CSS
  
    In this guide, let’s cover just about everything there is to know about this very useful function.
  
  Chris Coyier
    
      calc

So how do we make the whole card clickable? We could use JavaScript as a progressive enhancement to do that. We’ll start by adding a click event listener to the card and trigger the click on the main link when it is triggered.

const card = document.querySelector(".card")
const mainLink = document.querySelector('.main-link')
 
card.addEventListener("click", handleClick)
 
function handleClick(event) {
  mainLink.click();
}

Temporarily, this introduces the problem that we can’t select the text, which we’ve been trying to fix this whole time. Here’s the trick: we’ll use the relatively less-known web API window.getSelection. From MDN:

The Window.getSelection() method returns a Selection object representing the range of text selected by the user or the current position of the caret.

Although, this method returns an Object, we can convert it to a string with toString().

const isTextSelected = window.getSelection().toString()

With one line and no complicated kung-fu tricks with event listeners, we know if the user has selected text. Let’s use that in our handleClick function.

const card = document.querySelector(".card")
const mainLink = document.querySelector('.main-link')
 
card.addEventListener("click", handleClick)
 
function handleClick(event) {
  const isTextSelected = window.getSelection().toString();
  if (!isTextSelected) {
    mainLink.click();
  }
}

This way, the main link can be clicked when no text selected, and all it took was a few lines of JavaScript. This satisfies our requirements:

The whole thing is linked and clickable.
It is able to contain more than one link.
This content is semantic so assistive tech can understand it.
The text should be selectable, like regular links.
Things like right-click and keyboard shortcuts should work with it
Its elements should be focusable when tabbing.

We have satisfied all the requirements but there are still some gotchas, like double event triggering on clickable elements like links and buttons in the card. We can fix this by adding a click event listener on all of them and stopping the propagation of event.

// You might want to add common class like 'clickable' on all elements and use that for the query selector.
const clickableElements = Array.from(card.querySelectorAll("a"));
clickableElements.forEach((ele) =>
  ele.addEventListener("click", (e) => e.stopPropagation())
);

Here’s the final demo with all the JavaScript code we have added:

CodePen Embed Fallback

I think we’ve done it! Now you know how to make a perfect clickable card component.

What about other patterns? For example, what if the card contains the excerpt of a blog post followed by a “Read More’ link? Where should that go? Does that become the “main” link? What about image?

For those questions and more, here’s some further reading on the topic:

Cards by Heydon Pickering
Block Links, Cards, Clickable Regions, Rows, Etc. by Adrian Roselli
Block Links Are a Pain (and Maybe Just a Bad Idea) by Chris Coyier
Pitfalls of Card UIs by Dave Rupert

Block Links: The Search for a Perfect Solution originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

The Contrast Triangle

Chris Coyier — Mon, 20 Apr 2020 22:15:39 +0000

Chip Cullen:

Let’s say you’re building a site, and you’re working with a designer. They come to you with some solid designs, and you’re ready to go. You’re also a conscientious front end developer and you like to make sure the sites you build are accessible. The designs you’re working from have some body copy, but you notice that the links inside the body copy are missing underlines.
You are now in The Contrast Triangle.

The “triangle” meaning a three-sided comparison:

The contrast between the background and text
The contrast between the background and links
the contrast between text and links

I would think this matters whether you underline links or not, but I take the point that without underlines the problem is worse.

I’d also argue the problem is even more complicated. You’ve also got to consider the text when it is selected, and make sure everything has contrast when that is the case too. And the hover states, active states, visited states, and focus states. So it’s really like hexacontakaienneagon of contrast or something.

To Shared Link — Permalink on CSS-Tricks

The Contrast Triangle originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

links – CSS-Tricks

How to Safely Share Your Email Address on a Website

Table of contents

The traditional case

The HTML approach

The HTML & CSS approach

The JavaScript approach

The embedded form approach

Conclusion

Cool Hover Effects That Use Background Properties

Cool Hover Effects series:

Hover effect #1

Hover effect #2

Hover effect #3

Hover effect #4

Wrapping up

6 Creative Ideas for CSS Link Hover Effects

The Sliding Highlight Link Hover Effect

The Text Swappin’ Link Hover Effect

Why are hyperlinks blue?

Adam Argyle’s Sick Mouse-Out CSS Hover Effect

“I bet that’s using a transition on a background.”

“Maybe it’s a transform instead.”

“Now I need ::before to change on hover.”

“Hmm, the transition moves in both directions.”

CSS Underlines Are Too Thin and Too Low in Chrome

Table of Contents

Default underlines are inconsistent

Luckily, we can override the browsers’ defaults

Chrome bug 1: Underlines are too thin on macOS

Chrome bug 2: Underlines are too low

Help prioritize the Chrome bugs

Buttons vs. Links

On Browser-Specific URL Schemes

Application-Specific Links

target=blank

Why?

Create a Tag Cloud with some Simple CSS and even Simpler JavaScript

Let’s start with the markup

The JavasScript part

Font scaling

Now the CSS!

Excluding Emojis From Transparent Text Clipping

A CSS-only, animated, wrapping underline

Block Links: The Search for a Perfect Solution

Method 1: Wrap everything an

Method 2: Just link what needs linking

Method 3: The good ol’ ::before pseudo element

Method 4: Sprinkle JavaScript on the second method

A Complete Guide to calc() in CSS

The Contrast Triangle

“I bet that’s using a transition on a `background`.”

“Maybe it’s a `transform` instead.”

“Now I need `::before` to change on hover.”