DU wrote:[color=blue]
> Chris wrote:
>[color=green]
>> Harlan Messinger wrote:
>>[color=darkred]
>>> "Chris" <cdl9550@bellsouth.net> wrote in message
>>> news:dqhUc.7796$3I1.2968@bignews5.bellsouth.net...
>>>
>>>> I'm using eight links listed horizontally as a menu on my site. I'm
>>>> using font-variant:small-caps and they are padded so that they mimic
>>>> buttons. My gripe is with the way IE handles the focus rectangle on
>>>> these links. It insists on drawing this crazy shape that traces the
>>>> text, which with small caps looks rather assinine. Firefox handles the
>>>> same task very gracefully (yeah Gecko!) and I would like to force IE to
>>>> do the same.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> If something about a browser's behavior or appearance disturbs a user
>>> sufficiently, then he'll use a different browser. If he finds the
>>> disturbance to be mild or non-existent, then there isn't any point
>>> for one
>>> site, out of the millions of sites on the Web, to give him a momentarily
>>> different experience from the one he gets the rest of the time he
>>> uses his
>>> browser. At best any "benefit" is minuscule, and at worst the hack will
>>> result in surprise or confusion.
>>>
>>> Moreover, it is important for accessibility reasons to have a visual
>>> indication of the current link, and it would be irresponsible to
>>> remove it
>>> even if you could.
>>>
>>>
>>>> The site in question is
http://web.utk.edu/~clucas/Italy/Italy.html.
>>>> In particular, IE's focus rectangle is stepping on my border for the
>>>> menu bar (embedded in the background jpg, not rendered by the browser)
>>>> and upon clicking a link and going back the clicked link keeps its
>>>> focus
>>>> rectangle, which makes the whole thing look pretty shoddy. Can anyone
>>>> help me with this seemingly mundane query?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>[/color]
>> It seems my initial post was misinterpreted twice. I was
>> inquiring how to make IE use the same style/shape focus rectangle as
>> Gecko does. IE looks very poor while Firefox renders it beautifully.
>> I'm well aware of the implications of turning off focus rectangles
>> which is exactly why I didn't ask how to turn them off. Rather I was
>> interested in making them behave nicely. It turns out the best
>> solution was to alter the background jpg of the menu to not have a
>> border, and ask the browser to render the border manually. Although
>> IE still draws said rectangle outside the link and in an odd and
>> annoying shape, it does not draw it over the border. Why IE was
>> written to outline the text rather than the link itself makes little
>> sense to me and it would seem the good people at Mozilla.org as well.
>>
>> Perhaps in the future before launching into pedantic diatribe,[/color]
>
>
>
> People are volunteers here, not paid teachers or professionals waiting
> to get some questions in a 24 hour help desk. Don't be too hard here as
> both persons who replied to you volunteered quite some time to structure
> their replies.
>
> you
>[color=green]
>> should read the initial question more carefully and not presume to
>> know what the poster meant to ask. In this case neither response
>> attempted to answer the question I asked but rather seemed to chastise
>> me for trying to disable the focus rectangle.
>>
>> Chris[/color]
>
>
> Your question was I presume something like this:
> How to force MSIE to draw focus lines around links the way Firefox does it?
>
> Recent Firefox now create focus outline outside the border of elements:
> this is very recent CSS2 outline property support in Gecko/Mozilla-based
> browsers. Before, they were drawn inside the border.
> MSIE 6 does not support CSS2 outline property. So, I think you have to
> make your links change the border.
> I have a page that has the similar (very minor, cosmetic IMO) problem
> (for label):
>
http://www10.brinkster.com/doctorunc...ormatting.html
>
>
> Not tested
> **********
>
> a:active {border: 2px dotted black;}
>
> and in your markup:
>
> <a href="Orvieto/Orvieto.html" hidefocus="true" title="Jump to our
> Orvieto page"> Orvieto </a> <a href="..." ...>
>
> The small dotted typical IE outline should disappear. At least I tested
> <label hidefocus="true" onclick="this.style.border = '2px dotted
> black';"> and that works accordingly in MSIE 6.
>
>
> I see that you coded:
>
> #h li{display:inline}
>
> If your list-item are going to be inline elements, then why use an <ul>
> to begin with? Why not the straightforward
> <div id="h"><a href="Orvieto/Orvieto.html" title="Jump to our Orvieto
> page"> Orvieto </a> <a href="Roma/Roma.html" (...)
>
> One last thing about your code. I would definitively try to simplify
> your code (markup and CSS) if I were you. I personally never code the
> line-height because there are too many bugs and this property is not
> that helpful.
> There certainly should be a way to simplify your stylesheet.
> Also reading your markup code and css code is a real pain: no line
> breaks, indentation, blank space. You may be saving a few KB of file
> size here but you're definitively losing on the webpage maintenance time
> area (and code review by others). I would reduce number of colors and
> use .png instead of .jpg and would most likely save more KBs that way
> than by removing CRs, LFs, indentation, blank spaces.
>
> My 2 cents
>
> DU[/color]
DU,
I appreciate your reply. I am very new to both HTML and CSS (two
weeks) and am very interested in simplification wherever possible. The
menu code in question was lifted and adapted from some example on
horizontal menus I found by googling the subject. As for code
maintenance, I've written a CSS compactor and a XHTML compactor for
myself in Visual Basic that removes superfluous whitespace for me, thus
I get the best of both worlds. The code that I work on is nicely block
indented the way any decent coder would have insist upon having it.
Code review by others hadn't occurred to me however, that is certainly
something to think about.
As for the reduction of image quality, the site is just for my family
and friends (visitors are certainly welcome, but I can't imagine them
finding their way to my obscure corner of the web) and many of them are
still dialing up the internet, so they aren't clicking on my big
full-size pictures. Therefore, I'm reluctant to degrade too far the
quality of the images that they are looking at, i.e. the small ones on
the pages themselves.
I appreciate your tip about the CSS2 style support of the Gecko
rendering engine. I was afraid that this would be the case. Its a
shame that the browser with the vast majority of the market share is
slothful and stagnant. Thanks again for your help.
Chris
