[Please only post an answer if you know the answer really well -- if you post an answer such as "I think it is easy to style it in CSS", then it is a guess and not a real answer, and it will make lots of people skip this question because it is marked as "answered"]
[I know the Share button is to be phased out, replaced by the Like button, but the program management still wants to use it as well as using the Like button]
I see fairly often that the Facebook Share button is faked by using an icon, as a background, and the text "Share" as a "button" -- the icon + text is faked to be 1 button.
Example:
http://www.youtube.com/create_detail/GoAnimate
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2381106,00.asp
The surprising thing is, it actually looks good on FF as well as IE 7. And the top link uses Tahoma font, while the second one uses Verdana for Windows, and "Lucida Grande" for Mac.
Question 1: what is it not made into an image? Because as we all know, an image looks the same almost every where. If you need to align the icon with the text, for all different fonts on different platform - Mac, Win 7, Win XP, Vista, Linux, IE 7, IE 8, FF, Chrome, and make the background of the text blue so that it looks like part of a button, it is going to be hard. Different fonts have different top space and bottom space (the "leading" as in printing terms), so it is hard to align the text well with the icon, and also hard to make the font not to look like grainy text on all platforms.
Question 2: is there a standard library or standard method to do it?
(the long existing <fb-share> as XFBML actually gives you an <a>, with the background icon, and then a <span> inside the <a> tag containing the text "Share". So it is actually just a square icon + text, but such as the second link above, they will fake it as a button. Maybe that's why even when it is not XFBML, some people still show the button this way instead of a good old image)
Update: also, it is hard because they usually are just <span>, and you can't specify a width for a <span>. Also, it has double borders to make it look like 3D, but it looks like 1 border is real CSS border and 1 border is by using the Sprite underneath.
Update 2: By the way, of all the Facebook Share button page that still exist on web, I never saw one with a Bubble with a count... this is getting more mysterious...
There are three good reasons for doing it this way:
Reuse: You can use the same icon on several different buttons, regardless of what the text content of the button is. This means you only have to download the icon once, which saves on bandwidth (see below) and means you don't have to make a different button image for every button you want to provide to the user. This is especially important on multilingual sites, as I'm sure you can imagine.
Bandwidth saving: The small icon used to decorate the text button is a lot smaller than an entire button graphic would be and therefore consumes less bandwidth to download it. While for one button this might not amount to much, it all adds up, especially on a site with potentially hundreds of different buttons that gets the kind of traffic that a site like Youtube or Facebook might get.
Accessibility: Image buttons take some additional work to make them accessible (the addition of an alt tag for example) which can get overlooked by web developers in a hurry. Text buttons are accessible by default because they're, well, text.
As for how to do it well, there's any number of approaches. You could use the <button> tag, though this has its own set of issues in IE, you could use <input type="button" /> and give it a background and padding (so the text doesn't overwrite the background) but that approach will require javascript to make the button actually do anything, <input type="submit" /> (similar to buttons but handling them is done server side instead of with javascript), or you could style <a> tags to look like buttons by giving them a background, white top and left border, black bottom and right border, etc. I'm sure there's others as well that I can't remember off the top of my head.
UPDATE: The OP added an update regarding spans and width. By default, no, you can't give a span a width. If you give it padding you can create space inside for adding the icon as a background image, of course, but if you need to explicitly give a span a width you can do it by setting its cisplay CSS property to block or inline-block (the latter requires a modern browser to work)
Related
Last 24 hours I spent on figuring out how to control widows/orphans but without using widows and orphans selectors in my CSS. Believe it or not, but Kindle Oasis and Paperwhite for that matter (though I don't have this device at hand) use AZW3 files that do not support either widows:2 or orphans:2 or even break-after:avoid. My text has subheads that, if viewed on Kindle, get left behind at the bottom of the pages. I tried KFX, yes, and it is better in terms of layout (widows/orphans and breaks are supported) but KFX has another problem which is a deal-breaker for me - it underlines every link whether you specify text-decoration:none or not. I have about 2000 links in the text that I don't need underlined. Back to the problem - AZW3 doesn't have support for widows/orphans and page breaks. Can someone suggest how to go about accomplishing this:
p {
widows:2;
orphans:2:
}
or
p {
break-inside:avoid;
}
without the above CSS in order to control where text breaks on Kindle devices.
Thank you.
The only way I found how to force the lines to stay together, i.e. to imitate the break-inside:avoid; behavior, is to put an html element such as img which doesn't break across pages behind my text. Example:
<img src="transparent.png" style="height:3em;width:auto;"/>
<h style="margin-top:-2.5em">this is my header</h>
<p>this is my paragraph</p>
Notice that my PNG is called "transparent" - because that is all it is - a transparent square. My margin-top is slightly less than the height of the image thus still leaving some space above the header. Spacing can be modified with regular margins. Interestingly, this works well on Kindle Fire and Kindle Oasis where <h> and <p> text is forced to go to next page together because of the height of the image. Pending a better implementation of page-break and widow/orphan control on Kindles, this is probably the only way to control this behavior.
I made some research before writing here, but I couldn't find nothing that satisfied my answer to this specific case.
I have an icon, and when user hover onto it I want the icon become smaller and text (caption for the icon) should appear -at icons bottom.
As now, I have an interaction for the icon, that makes it become smaller.
It's first time for me working with WebFlow, and I see that using overlapping blocks they work as layers in the sense that the one on top is the only one who react to hovering.
I found in other questions that there was the need of setting correctly absolute/relative for blocks, but is not working for me since I have also the icon, inside the same block.
If I move the icon out of the block, I have the problem I shared before about overlapping "layers".
I need that icon decrease in size and text appear at the same time.
Is this achievable?
Thank you for your help!
I know trying for fixed-display is usually a web design no-no, but please hear me out!
I'm developing a whiteboard-like addition to the forum I run. Long-story-short, the idea is that a user can type up their posts with text and bbcode like normal, then instatiate a managed canvas on top of their text, doodle on it with their mouse, hit submit, and then the doodle will show up on top of their post. The server processes the image into a transparent-background png and then aligns it properly into the text.
So I actually have the backend processing and the front-end interface all working well together. The only part left to do is the display, in which the processed doodle is aligned on top of the text. And, for this to work, the alignment of the image on the text needs to be pretty precise. If the user, say, circles or crosses-out a word, and the text isnt rendered in the same way for another user, the end-result is gonna be wrong. So, I figure that I need to get the text-display locked down. This is kind of annoying, because right now everything is pretty fluid, but hey, this will be a pretty cool feature, right? So, I've fixed the width of the post-display box, but I'm stumped as to what to do about the font - how to set the size, face, letter-spacing, line-spacing, etc so the display is as fixed as possible for different users on different monitors on different computers.
Does anyone have any ideas? If it helps, I'm not at all concerned with IE or mobile displays...
Kerning is going to be your biggest issue,but it should be easy enough by looking at the monospaced fonts available for font-face on fontsquirrel, something like this should do it
http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/CPMono_v07
monospaced fonts should have equal letterspacing.
You can get finer control using letter-spacing:, line-height: and font-size: css classes
hope that's some help.
In other topics I've found that IE/FF doesn't print background images by default. Now that's a shame, because background images add some possibilities that are very difficult to reproduce with classical <img> tags:
You can align them both horizontally and vertically
You can crop them if they are larger than the target element (which also enables the idea of CSS sprites)
Now, it's not impossible to do, but it will require me to have different HTML layouts for printing and normal page, and the printing layout will be quite overcomplicated (since I'll have to use <table>s to achieve vertical alignment). Also, the benefits of CSS sprites will be lost.
Is there any hope? I gather that #media print doesn't help, but isn't there something else, maybe browser-specific, that would allow one to say: "Yes, this isn't a normal background, it really needs to be there even in print view"?
Not possible. You would have to some how convert your background images to img or use Canvas. Of course using canvas depends on which IE you supporting.
Its a browser setting which restricts the printing of background images. I think the logic behind it was that the vendors wanted to give the users the option of printing background images and ensure that the web developer could not alter these settings through some sort of script.
As a general rule, background images should be reserved for adding to the page design but aren't essential to understanding the content. Therefore it shouldn't matter if they are missing when the page is printed. If something (such as a product shot) is important, then it should be included as an actual image (which has the added bonus of being more accessible).
Could you look at including the image, then hiding it using CSS and duplicating is as a background image (perhaps dynamically using JS)? That way, you can ensure the image itself shows in your print stylesheet, and you get the benefits that having a background image brings. I've created a very simple example here.
I have an internal web app with an image at the top of the page, currently containing some english text with drop shadows. I now need to provide localized versions of this page for various languages. My main choices are:
Have a different graphic per supported language, containing the localized text.
Use CSS to position localized text over a plain image, with a complex CSS technique to get drop shadows in most current browsers.
Are there other options? This is for an educational environment, I don't get to control the browser used by the students.
I did try both removing the drop shadows from the graphic, and also moving the text into in a header in the HTML, but neither was appealing. People said it looked like a cheap knockoff of the current page, which wounds my pride.
Personally I'm a big fan of CSS techniques for visual effects like this. The big benefit is that you are offloading the processing of the effect to the client side, saving you bandwith and content creation time (custom text images for each locale is a big order!), and making the page download faster for the user.
The only reason to avoid it is if you absolutely MUST have the drop shadows on very old (IE5) browsers with next to no CSS support.
Edit: Just thought of something - I a few cases like this where I need a specific font or some exact text effect I've used PHP to render the text, with effects, to an image and cache it server side. That way you avoid the content creation process and gain wider browser support in exchange for bandwidth and server CPU time. It's your call if the tradeoff is acceptable.
Generate the images on request server-side for each language, complete with shadows. Cache them as needed.
If you can use Image Magick, you can refer to this tutorial for generating text + shadows...
Maintaining images with text can be a pain - even without localization, I'd avoid it.
Two choices that I would attempt before going with your options are:
Looking for a free program that generates drop-shadow images that you can have your program utilize whenever it detects that new text is available for the title
Using a shadow image that can be repeated as a background image underneath the text
If those don't work, I'd try the CSS, but test it in as many browsers as you can yourself before going live with it.
Well, Safari supports a proprietary CSS property for drop-shadows, but it won't work in other browsers. CSS3 will have drop-shadows, too (actually only one for boxes, but maybe it can be used for text, too, e.g. when the box has a transparent background).
But seeing that most browsers don't even have a 100% CSS2 support so far, I guess you need to go with one of your two options. Of course, there is a not so complex CSS trick to get a drop shadow:
Drop Shadows for Everyone
But they don't look as nice as a real shadow, since they are not blurred. Further you need to have the text twice in the HTML for these to work.