Checkboxes with Raphael, svg or html inputs? - button

So I would like to use some customised checkboxes for my application. I'm not very experienced so I don't really know which way would be the best, but what I've done right now seems somewhat inefficient to me (mainly because I don't know how to copy this button around so each button would require the same amount of code). The button in this jsFiddle is just a simple example, the final might be a bit more elaborate but regardless the point comes through.
The questions are:
1) Which method is best for these type of buttons, Raphael SVG or PNG images with HTML inputs(?)?
2) If Raphael, what would be the best method of producing around 6 of these buttons with different click functions (possibly hover colours would be different too)? I know that creating multiple sets which use same basic variables didn't work.
jsFiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/Wx6vh/2/

Related

creating a round list in CSS (for a round menubar)

I am really hoping someone can help me. I am trying to create a round menubar in CSS and I've searched and searched for solutions but have found nothing. I know how to create round areas (by setting the radius), and I know how to create a simple straight line menu using <ul> & <li> but, as said, I want to create a round one.
there is a picture of something alike what I'd love to get working:
If anyone could help me on this I'd be so thoroughly grateful.
Closest things I know of are these:
http://www.cssplay.co.uk/menus/cssplay-round-and-round.html
http://codepen.io/tgrant54/pen/lBHwK
Is that what you're after?
This menu looks almost like Path's Button.
You can find the link to Path's Button here.
You just need to modify it a bit so the menu displayed in full sphere.
This isn't something you really want to be doing in pure CSS.
You may be able to make circle shapes with border-radius, but you're not actually making a circular object -- it's still a regular box shape as far as the browser is concerned, just with the corners rounded off. This has absolutely no bearing at all on your ability to do anything else to do with circles or curves in CSS.
Yes, it's possible to do something along the lines you're after, by putting every character into its own element, and styling each of them with a specific position, but that's going to be painful, inflexible, and difficult to work with. If you really want to do this, there's a code generator you could try out here, but I'd say you're barking up the wrong tree.
If you want to do this kind of thing properly, what you really need to be thinking about is doing it in graphical format, using either Canvas or SVG, plus plenty of javascript code.
I'd suggest looking into a JS library like Raphael for this; there are people who have tried similar things already using Raphael, which may help you -- see here, for example: Radial Pie Menu With Raphael JS
Hope that helps.

radio buttons int html5 form - zoom issue

So I've heard people talk about things that hate to resize, and that radio buttons are one of them. As such, I was curious if there was a work-around? textareas don't resize nice when using rows/columns, but do when you use width. I tried a similar approach and gave my radio inputs a heights, but didn't 'fix' zoom issue.
And so here I am wondering if there's a fix of sorts for this. I have a fluid layout so it's fine, but it turns out quite bad '~'.
You can create a styled replacement (a plus is that you can have the look you want), almost like jQuery Mobile does. It's not that hard.
Some things to give you kickstart:
Hide the original input with javascript;
Insert your markup to generate the "fake" input;
Wireup the events on your replacement to activate or deactivate the original input with the click, focus and blur events.
Also, there are a lot of plugins that can do it for you, like http://www.azurem.com/jqf1/
Radio buttons look and feel are usually determined by the OS, as such, it's quite hard to resize them.
A good alternative would be to fake it with an image.

CSS form buttons

I'm looking for a good way to implement reusable buttons in CSS on my forms. The requirements:
- Separate image and text (text is in many languages)
- Rollover effects
- Plays nicely cross browser
- No javascript (if possible)
- Rounded corners
Whats the best way to do this? Years ago I was using the sliding doors technique, but this seems out of date now. Would you use CSS3 with a fallback for older browsers? Any particularly well thought of techniques out there?
Jquery UI buttons are AWESOME. They're fully tested, completely compliant, and really look great. With one line of code, you can have a fully styled button in no time flat. Here's the thing--they can be executed without Jquery (go figure)
First, the tut
So, the standard method is to build an element (a, button, input) with an id and set it as a button in Jquery like this:$('#element').button()
However, if you do it in the manner that the tutorial shows, you just have to add some classes to an element to get a similar effect. So, to make a button out of an a tag, it would just be
Button
In this example, there's no need to set the button with the jQuery button declaration...you're doing it by style only. With the flexibility to style so many different type of elements, it opens up a ton of doors.
You would have to have the Jquery UI css loaded, which offers the added benefit of ThemeRoller, which can style elements on the page with a simple change of a file. It's really a great way to "theme" a site that has to change branding in a hurry, which has made custom themed apps my company puts out extremely profitable.
I would use css sprites for this. You can find out about them here:
http://css-tricks.com/css-sprites/
It is basically a way to make one large image that has all states of buttons(normal, hover, selected). The benefit is it is one http request and you don't see a flicker the first time a hover occurs. If you use this route, the css background property will be the image. You can then use text-align and line-height to center the text that you want to place over the image.
This library, Nifty Corners Cubed uses Javascript but is a fairly clean way to round div tags links, etc. It is tough to find a reusable solution without using a sliding doors derived technique. Otherwise you stuck making none-resuable buttons that have to fit to your size.
You can also take a look at PIE http://css3pie.com/
A sprite is a great option and I do use them from time to time.
Personally I don't mind if my websites aren't identical in all browsers and I go the CSS class route. I keep in mind what is and isn't supported by various browsers and if there is an element that needs to be a certain way I will double check with W3Schools for compatibility.
The main benefit the keeps me using CSS/CSS3 classes is if something changes it is done quickly by text in a single file, if need be I can do a quick change from a 10 year old computer with a dial-up connection (if they still exist) and no imaging software.
Where the advantage of a sprite is they are supported across all browsers and they will look identical (more or less). SpriteMe is a bookmarklet that I have heard of to help with sprites if you decide to go down this path.
I see this as a what do you prefer matter... these questions are what I ask myself when making this type of decision:
How often will it change? Big or small changes? Will it be a complete redesign job if it changes? What do you already know? How much time are you willing to spend learning something that you may not know? What does your gut say for this project?
I hope this can help you.

What web technology to opt for to offer interactive colouring?

A customer has asked us to a add a feature to his website allowing visitors to colour in panels in a simple line drawing.
The website visitor will have a limited palette to choose from and will select a colour and click in a shape within the line drawing to colour it in as in:
There will only be four or five of these line drawings. The drawings themselves are not required to be interactive or flexible, only the colouring.
The line drawings will be super simple and we don't need to save the visitor's selections although the visitor will want to print or email the result.
Simple simple stuff. Most of the time where you see this done on sophisticated websites I assume it's done with Flash.
But is Flash the only way to go? Or can it be done with JQuery/Javascript or Silverlight or something else? Our team's knowledge covers ASP.NET, HTML, CSS, Javascript. No experience of Flash.
If you have a finite number of line drawings, and a limited number of colours, you could just pre-generate every possible colour/section combination - isolate each area as a transparent GIF/PNG and composite them using position:absolute to create an "onion skin" / animation cel effect. Use some old-school HTML image-map code (or server-side parsing of the myimage.X / myimage.Y parameters, or jQuery) to work out where they clicked, identify the image section under the mouse click location, and replace that image only with the corresponding version in their selected colour.
You can't draw these kinds of shape without using canvas or SVG. And I am not sure about the support provided by browsers for these.
If you can go for canvas then you ca ntake a look at
Processing js library
or for SVG
Raphaël—JavaScript Library
There are only two ways i can think of atm:
Split the line drawings into the colourable elements and show each image absolutly positioned to merge the images into one on the website.
Use Javascript to load a pre-coloured image of that part with "onclick" (or generate a coloured version with asp/php/whatever server-side.
Not sure if it's possible to print absolute positioned elements cleanly.
Use flash, it's simple there so even without experience you should be able to do it in 1-2 workdays.
My guess is that you could use the new HTML 5 canvas element to achieve this goal in an open, standards compliant manner.
Note: canvas is a new feature and is only supported in recent browser releases (latest Safari, Firefox or Chrome for example).

How to grow a textbox to match size of input for data entry dynamically (ASP.NET)

I'd like to add a description field to an application that can be as long as several lines (or even paragraphs) or as short as a one-liner.
Instead of taking up a lot of screen real estate or have scroll bars, it would be preferable to have the textbox grow based on its input.
On IE6 adding Style="overflow-y:visible" accomplishes this nicely (both on display of read only, and if we are in edit mode).
However, it has no effect on Firefox, or IE7 for that matter.
Is there a relatively easy fix for this?
Thanks!
You can accomplish this using jquery if you want to go down that route. It's a nice effect, kind of like the comment textarea in facebook.
http://javascriptly.com/examples/jquery-grab-bag/autogrow-textarea.html

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