Post pobrano z: Simple Patterns for Separation (Better Than Color Alone)

Color is pretty good for separating things. That’s what your basic pie chart is, isn’t it? You tell the slices apart by color. With enough color contrast, you might be OK, but you might be even better off (particularly where accessibility is concerned) using patterns, or a combination.

Patrick Dillon tackled the Pie Chart thing

Enhancing Charts With SVG Patterns:

When one of the slices is filled with something more than color, it’s easier to figure out [who the Independents are]:

See the Pen Political Party Affiliation – #2 by Patrick Dillon (@pdillon) on CodePen.

Filling a pie slice with a pattern is not a common charting library feature (yet), but if your library of choice is SVG-based, you are free to implement SVG patterns.

As in, literally a <pattern /> in SVG!

Here’s a simple one for horizontal lines:

<pattern 
    id="horzLines" 
    width="8" 
    height="4" 
    patternUnits="userSpaceOnUse">
       <line 
          x1="0" 
          y1="0" 
          x2="8" 
          y2="0" 
         style="stroke:#999;stroke-width:1.5" 
       />
</pattern>

Now any SVG element can use that pattern as a fill. Even strokes. Here’s an example of mixed usage of two simple patterns:

See the Pen Simple Line Patterns by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.

That’s nice for filling SVG elements, but what about HTML elements?

Irene Ros created Pattern Fills that are SVG based, but usable in CSS also.

Using SVG Patterns as Fills:

There are several ways to use Pattern Fills:

• You can use the patterns.css file that contains all the current patterns. That will only work for non-SVG elements.

• You can use individual patterns, but copying them from the sample pages. CSS class definitions can be found here and SVG pattern defs can be found here

• You can add your own patterns or modify mine! The conversion process from SVG document to pattern is very tedious. The purpose of the pattern fills toolchain is to simplify this process. You can clone the repo, run npm install and grunt dev to get a local server going. After that, any changes or additions to the src/patterns/**/* files will be automatically picked up and will re-render the CSS file and the sample pages. If you make new patterns, send them over in a pull request!

Here’s me applying them to SVG elements (but could just as easily be applied to HTML elements):

See the Pen Practical Patterns by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.

The CSS usage is as base64 data URLs though, so once they are there they aren’t super duper manageable/changeable.

Here’s Irene with an old timey chart, using d3:

Managing an SVG pattern in CSS

If your URL encode the SVG just right, you and plop it right into CSS and have it remain fairly managable.

See the Pen Simple Line Patterns by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.

Other Examples Combining Color

Here’s one by John Schulz:

See the Pen SVG Colored Patterns by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.

Ricardo Marimón has an example creating the pattern in d3. The pattern looks largely the same on the slices, but perhaps it’s a start to modify.

Other Pattern Sources

We rounded a bunch of them up recently!

Simple Patterns for Separation (Better Than Color Alone) is a post from CSS-Tricks

Post pobrano z: How to Disable Links

The topic of disabling links popped up at my work the other day. Somehow, a „disabled” anchor style was added to our typography styles last year when I wasn’t looking. There is a problem though: there is no real way to disable an <a> link (with a valid href attribute) in HTML. Not to mention, why would you even want to? Links are the basis of the web.

At a certain point, it looked like my co-workers were not going to accept this fact, so I started thinking of how this could be accomplished. Knowing that it would take a lot, I wanted to prove that it was not worth the effort and code to support such an unconventional interaction, but I feared that by showing it could be done they would ignore all my warnings and just use my example as proof that it was OK. This hasn’t quite shaken out for me yet, but I figured we could go through my research.

First, things first:

Just don’t do it.

A disabled link is not a link, it’s just text. You need to rethink your design if it calls for disabling a link.

Bootstrap has examples of applying the .disabled class to anchor tags, and I hate them for it. At least they mention that the class only provides a disabled style, but this is misleading. You need to do more than just make a link look disabled if you really want to disable it.

Surefire way: remove the href

If you have decided that you are going to ignore my warning and proceed with disabling a link, then removing the href attribute is the best way I know how.

Straight from the official Hyperlink spec:

The href attribute on a and area elements is not required; when those elements do not have href attributes they do not create hyperlinks.

An easier to understand definition from MDN:

This attribute may be omitted (as of HTML5) to create a placeholder link. A placeholder link resembles a traditional hyperlink, but does not lead anywhere.

Here is basic JavaScript code to set and remove the href attribute:

/* 
 * Use your preferred method of targeting a link
 *
 * document.getElementById('MyLink');
 * document.querySelector('.link-class');
 * document.querySelector('[href="https://unfetteredthoughts.net"]');
 */
// "Disable" link by removing the href property
link.href = '';
// Enable link by setting the href property
link.href = 'https://unfetteredthoughts.net';

Styling this via CSS is also pretty straightforward:

a {
  /* Disabled link styles */
}
a:link, a:visited { /* or a[href] */
  /* Enabled link styles */
}

That’s all you need to do!

That’s not enough, I want something more complex so that I can look smarter!

If you just absolutely have to over-engineer some extreme solution, here are some things to consider. Hopefully, you will take heed and recognize that what I am about to show you is not worth the effort.

First, we need to style our link so that it looks disabled.

.isDisabled {
  color: currentColor;
  cursor: not-allowed;
  opacity: 0.5;
  text-decoration: none;
}

<a class="isDisabled" href="https://unfetteredthoughts.net">Disabled Link</a>

Setting color to currentColor should reset the font color back to your normal, non-link text color. I am also setting the mouse cursor to not-allowed to display a nice indicator on hover that the normal action is not allowed. Already, we have left out non-mouse users that can’t hover, mainly touch and keyboard, so they won’t get this indication. Next the opacity is cut to half. According to WCAG, disabled elements do not need to meet color contrast guidelines. I think this is very risky since it’s basically plain text at this point, and dropping the opacity in half would make it very hard to read for users with low-vision, another reason I hate this. Lastly, the text decoration underline is removed as this is usually the best indicator something is a link. Now this looks like a disabled link!

But it’s not really disabled! A user can still click/tap on this link. I hear you screaming about pointer-events.

.isDisabled {
  ...
  pointer-events: none;
}

Ok, we are done! Disabled link accomplished! Except, it’s only really disabled for mouse users clicking and touch users tapping. What about browsers that don’t support pointer-events? According to caniuse, this is not supported for Opera Mini and IE<11. IE11 and Edge actually don't support pointer-events unless display is set to block or inline-block. Also, setting pointer-events to none overwrites our nice not-allowed cursor, so now mouse users will not get that additional visual indication that the link is disabled. This is already starting to fall apart. Now we have to change our markup and CSS…

.isDisabled {
  cursor: not-allowed;
  opacity: 0.5;
}
.isDisabled > a {
  color: currentColor;
  display: inline-block;  /* For IE11/ MS Edge bug */
  pointer-events: none;
  text-decoration: none;
}

<span class="isDisabled"><a href="https://unfetteredthoughts.net">Disabled Link</a></span>

Wrapping the link in a <span> and adding the isDisabled class gives us half of our disabled visual style. A nice side-affect here is that the disabled class is now generic and can be used on other elements, like buttons and form elements. The actual anchor tag now has the pointer-events and text-decoration set to none.

What about keyboard users? Keyboard users will use the ENTER key to activate links. pointer-events are only for pointers, there is no keyboard-events. We also need to prevent activation for older browsers that don’t support pointer-events. Now we have to introduce some JavaScript.

Bring in the JavaScript

// After using preferred method to target link
link.addEventListener('click', function (event) {
  if (this.parentElement.classList.contains('isDisabled')) {
    event.preventDefault();
  }
});

Now our link looks disabled and does not respond to activation via clicks, taps, and the ENTER key. But we are still not done! Screen reader users have no way of knowing that this link is disabled. We need to describe this link as being disabled. The disabled attribute is not valid on links, but we can use aria-disabled="true".

<span class="isDisabled"><a href="https://unfetteredthoughts.net" aria-disabled="true">Disabled Link</a></span>

Now I am going to take this opportunity to style the link based on the aria-disabled attribute. I like using ARIA attributes as hooks for CSS because having improperly styled elements is an indicator that important accessibility is missing.

.isDisabled {
  cursor: not-allowed;
  opacity: 0.5;
}
a[aria-disabled="true"] {
  color: currentColor;
  display: inline-block;  /* For IE11/ MS Edge bug */
  pointer-events: none;
  text-decoration: none;
}

Now our links look disabled, act disabled, and are described as disabled.

Unfortunately, even though the link is described as disabled, some screen readers (JAWS) will still announce this as clickable. It does that for any element that has a click listener. This is because of developer tendency to make non-interactive elements like div and span as pseudo-interactive elements with a simple listener. Nothing we can do about that here. Everything we have done to remove any indication that this is a link is foiled by the assistive technology we were trying to fool, ironically because we have tried to fool it before.

But what if we moved the listener to the body?

document.body.addEventListener('click', function (event) {
  // filter out clicks on any other elements
  if (event.target.nodeName == 'A' && event.target.getAttribute('aria-disabled') == 'true') {
    event.preventDefault();
  }
});

Are we done? Well, not really. At some point we will need to enable these links so we need to add additional code that will toggle this state/behavior.

function disableLink(link) {
// 1. Add isDisabled class to parent span
  link.parentElement.classList.add('isDisabled');
// 2. Store href so we can add it later
  link.setAttribute('data-href', link.href);
// 3. Remove href
  link.href = '';
// 4. Set aria-disabled to 'true'
  link.setAttribute('aria-disabled', 'true');
}
function enableLink(link) {
// 1. Remove 'isDisabled' class from parent span
  link.parentElement.classList.remove('isDisabled');
// 2. Set href
  link.href = link.getAttribute('data-href');
// 3. Remove 'aria-disabled', better than setting to false
  link.removeAttribute('aria-disabled');
}

That’s it. We now have a disabled link that is visually, functionally, and semantically disabled for all users. It only took 10 lines of CSS, 15 lines of JavaScript (including 1 listener on the body), and 2 HTML elements.

Seriously folks, just don’t do it.

How to Disable Links is a post from CSS-Tricks

Post pobrano z: 4 Reasons to Go PRO on CodePen

I could probably list about 100 reasons, since as a founder, user, and (ahem) PRO member of CodePen myself, I’m motivated to do so. But let me just list a few here. Some of these are my favorites, some are what PRO members have told us are their favorite, and some are lesser-known but very awesome.

1) No-hassle Debug View

Debug View is a way to look at your the Pen you’ve built with zero CodePen UI around it and no <iframe> containing it. Raw output! That’s a dangerous thing, in the world of user-generated code. It could be highly abused if we let it go unchecked. The way it works is fairly simple.

You can use Debug View if :

1. You’re logged in
2. The Pen is PRO-owned

Logging in isn’t too big of a deal, but sometimes that’s a pain if you just wanna shoot over a Debug View URL to your phone or to CrossBrowserTesting or something. If you’re PRO, you don’t worry about it at all, Debug View is totally unlocked for your Pens.

2) Collab with anybody anytime

Collab Mode on CodePen is the one that’s like Google Docs: people can work together in real time on the same Pen. You type, they see you type, they type, you see what they type.

Here’s what is special about that:

• There is nothing to install or set up, just shoot anybody a link.
• Only you need to be PRO. Nobody else does. They don’t even have to be logged in.

Basically, you can be coding together with someone (or just one or the other of you watching, if you please) in about 2 seconds. Here’s a short silent video if you wanna see:

People use it for all sorts of things. In classrooms and educational contexts, for hiring interviews, and just for working out problems with people across the globe.

Drag and drop uploading

Need to quickly host an asset (like an image) somewhere? As in, quickly get a URL for it that you can use and count on forever? It’s as easy as can be on CodePen.

If you’re working on a Project, you can drag and drop files right into the sidebar as well:

Save Anything Privately

Privacy is unlimited on CodePen. If you’re PRO, you can make unlimited Private Pens and Private Collections. You’re only limited in Private Projects by the total number of Projects on your plan. This is the number one PRO feature on CodePen for a variety of reasons. People use them to keep client work safe. People use them to experiment without anyone seeing messy tidbits. People use them to keep in-progress ideas.

I didn’t even mention my actual favorite CodePen PRO feature. I’ll have to share that one some other time 😉

Go PRO on CodePen

4 Reasons to Go PRO on CodePen is a post from CSS-Tricks

Post pobrano z: SVG as a Placeholder

It wasn’t long ago when Mikael Ainalem’s Pen demonstrated how you might use SVG outlines in HTML then lazyload the image (later turned into a webpack loader by Emil Tholin). It’s kind of like a skeleton screen, in that it gives the user a hint of what’s coming. Or the blur up technique, which loads a very small image blurrily blown up as the placeholder image.

José M. Pérez documents those, plus some more basic options (nothing, an image placeholder, or a solid color), and best of all, a very clever new idea using Primitive (of which there is a mac app and JavaScript version), which creates overlapping SVG shapes to use as the placeholder image. Probably a bit bigger-in-size than some of the other techniques, but still much smaller than a high res JPG!

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

SVG as a Placeholder is a post from CSS-Tricks

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