Here is the full presentation (HTML): CSS3 Attribute Lovin’. Feel free to copy, share, or do whatever you like with it.

I’ll post some more information on the new topics soon. Right now I’ve got to get back to my massive list of outstanding bugs on my project.

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There’s a little attribute in HTML links that is starting to get a bit of attention lately. The “rel” attribute is a sparsely defined attribute that applies some meta information about a link’s relationship to other documents. Unfortunately, this information is usually hidden from your users. Let’s take a light-hearted stab at turning it into a visual element.

Rel attribute usage

While the W3C originally considered the rel attribute to describe the relationship of pages to each other, i.e. next, previous, directory, and start. The attribute has been adopted by the Microformat community for its inherit usefulness. The rel attribute is now used for tags, to define your relationship to someone, and even to tell search engines not to bother following a link.

The opportunities to use the rel attribute are seemingly endless. There are more proposals to define people you don’t like and links for voting.

But all of this flexibility comes at a small price. To remain valid, you need to tell the browser what these new rel values may actually mean. This is handled by linking to appropriate profiles. Just simply insert the profiles into your head tag. Multiple profiles may throw a validation error, but it’s ok. You don’t need to do this for the standard rel values.

We will be using the CSS3 attribute selector functionality to look at the value of the rel attribute and apply some style accordingly. First we’ll add some padding and a background image to any link that has a rel attribute. We’ll then use background positioning to display an icon that is appropriate for the link. It’s a fairly simple hack.

For more information on using attribute selectors, check out my previous posts:

• Progressive enhancement of links using the CSS attribute selector
• Attribute selectors to provide language information

Sample HTML Code

Sample CSS


a[rel] {padding-left:20px; background:url(rel-sprite.png) no-repeat 0 0; }
a[rel~="help"] {background-position: 0 -350px ;}
a[rel~="license"] {background-position: 0 -1347px ;}
a[rel~="no-follow"] {background-position: 0 -1200px ;}
a[rel~="tag"] {background-position: 0 -47px ;}


It’s all fun and games

I’ll be the first to admit this exercise has significant issues. I’m assuming the following elements are true:

1. All possible rel attribute values are accounted for in my CSS, if not there will be a blank space generated by the first rule
2. You can only have one relationship defined by XFN. Unfortunately, most people are defined by multiple values, i.e. rel=”met friend colleague”. This CSS does not account for multiple values.

So, the display of your rel attributes may be a bit off in the edge cases. Keep the spirit light and nobody will say anything… I hope. Have fun with your rel attributes. They’re just sitting there waiting to be used.

View the finished rel attribute style example.

Related Information

• Microformats Wiki: Profile URI’s
• Microformat: Rel Design Pattern
• Microformat: Tags
• Microformat: No Follow
• Microformat: Bookmark
• Microformat: XFN – Friends Network
• Microformat: XEN – Enemies Network
• W3C: Link Types
• Icon Buffet – The source of most icons used in this example

We have avoided using CSS3 rules for too long. It’s been difficult to justify using rules that won’t work for a significant portion of our audience, Internet Explorer 7 and below. However, Internet Explorer 8 is coming out soon and does work with the features we like.

I think it’s fairly safe to assume IE7 users will upgrade to IE8 within a short time. Those stuck with IE6 for one reason or another will slowly disappear as they are given new computers or their locked down environments are upgraded.

So, with the future of CSS3 functionality within reach, I’ve been energized to begin experimenting again. I’ll be writing a series of blog posts over the next few months that look at CSS3 functionality as a progressive enhancement. How can we continue to deliver a perfectly fine web site to IE6 and IE7 and mobile phones while enhancing the functionality of more modern browsers and devices?

Attribute Selectors

CSS attribute selectors are the golden ring on the web development merry-go-round. They can be daunting to learn, addictive to use, but then disappointing when you realize they are out of your grasp when you test in Internet Explorer. We can, however, begin using them to add additional functionality based on your pre-existing, semantic code. Attribute selectors give you power to write CSS that pinpoints the stuff you already code, without having to go back and add classes or ids. I’ve written previously about using attribute selectors to let your users know the language of a site they are about to visit. This trick relies on the rarely used hreflang attribute, which identifies the language of the site targeted in a link.

There are many other attributes in your HTML, from table headers, image src, link titles, and selected options. Think about all of those juicy attributes just waiting to be targeted. Also think about how you could actually do something useful with them.

Announce the file type of a link with CSS

I once worked for a company that had hundreds of thousands of static HTML pages in their intranet. With no content management system; it was impossible to make global changes. The only thing they shared was a common set of style sheets. Does this sound familiar? Follow along as we increase your site’s usability in a less than perfect, but efficient way.

First off, for accessibility, you need to let users know when a link will open a file, what type it is, and how large it is. This is best done by adding it to your HTML code:


Foo presentation (.pdf, 5kb)


That delivers the information to everyone, regardless of their browser. This, however takes time and is a daunting task for updating legacy code.

We can, however, use the atttribute selector to target the extension of the link to display the icon and insert the text describing the file type. Here’s the sample HTML code:

It’s a simple list of links for different types of files. We’ll be looking at the extensions: .zip, .pdf, .doc, .exe, .png, and .mp3. Feel free to extend this list to any extension you so desire. This would be especially helpful for a company that uses proprietary file types within their intranet.

Now, let’s look at the CSS:


a[href$="zip"],
a[href$="pdf"],
a[href$="doc"],
a[href$="exe"],
a[href$="png"],
a[href$="mp3"] {padding-left:20px; background:url(bg-file-icons.png) no-repeat 0 0;}
a[href$="png"]{background-position: 0 -48px;}
a[href$="pdf"] {background-position: 0 -99px;}
a[href$="mp3"]{background-position: 0 -145px;}
a[href$="doc"]{background-position: 0 -199px;}
a[href$="exe"]{background-position: 0 -250px;}

a[href$=".zip"]:after{content: "(.zip file)"; color:#999; margin-left:5px;}
a[href$=".pdf"]:after{content: "(.pdf file)"; color:#999; margin-left:5px;}
a[href$=".doc"]:after{content: "(.doc file)"; color:#999; margin-left:5px;}
a[href$=".exe"]:after{content: "(.exe file)"; color:#999; margin-left:5px;}
a[href$=".mp3"]:after{content: "(.mp3 file)"; color:#999; margin-left:5px;}
a[href$=".png"]:after{content: "(.png file)"; color:#999; margin-left:5px;}
a[href$=".exe"]:after{content: "(.exe file)"; color:#999; margin-left:5px;}


See the final test page.

Pattern matching in the attribute selector

We have some limited “regular expression” functionality in CSS3. We can search for an attribute’s presence and match a pattern within the attribute’s value.
Patrick Hunlon has a good summary of the pattern matching:

• [foo] — Has an attribute named “foo”
• [foo="bar"] — Has an attribute named “foo” with a value of “bar” (“bar”)
• [foo~="bar"] — Value has the word “bar” in it somewhere (“blue bar stools”)
• [foo^="bar"] — Value begins with “bar” (“barstool”)
• [foo$="bar"] — Value ends with “bar” (“I was at the bar”)
• [foo*="bar"] — Value has bar somewhere (“I was looking for barstools”)

Attach icons to anything with CSS

The CSS is simply looking to see if the desired extension is at the end of the link href. If so, apply the following styles.

Adding an icon to the link

First, we are match any of the desired file extensions. We then add a background image and some padding on the left side with a bulk rule. Then the background position on the sprite is adjust for each particular link type. Combining multiple icons into one background image reduces the number of files the user has to download, making your page faster. This will work with any browser that recognizes attribute selectors, including Internet Explorer 7. However, support for more obscure attributes may be spotty.

There’s another peculiarity with pattern matching. Some attributes are case sensitive while others are not. The href attribute is NOT case sensitive, so the above rules will also work if your image name was FOO.ZIP, foo.Zip, or foo.zip.

Adding the descriptive text

Now, we are going to add a bit of descriptive text to each link. We can’t describe the file size, but we can tell the user what type of file it is. This is using the :after(content:) functionality and is supported by Internet Explorer 8 (yeah!!!) but not Internet Explorer 7 and below (boo!!!).
We will also adjust the color and give it a bit of spacing.

A big step forward with a small chunk of work

There you have it. A small chunk of CSS coding has now added substantial usability to your legacy pages. While the CSS version is not as accessible as having the data in the actual link code, it’s a significant improvement over nothing at all. Further, there’s no harmful effect on browsers that do not understand the function. You’ve added information, but haven’t taken anything away. This is a win in my book. To save some time and effort, you could just download and use this package of CSS and icons from Alexander Kaiser.

This rather simple example of attribute selectors and pattern matching can open your eyes to many possibilities. There are a number of developers that have been expoloring this potential for the past few years. Take a look at some of these resources for more ideas and have some fun.

• CSS3 – Atribute Selectors Definition W3C
• CSS 3 Selectors Explained
• CSS: A Tribute to Selectors
• YUI: Selector Utility Use CSS3 selectors in JavaScript
• Dynamic File Type Notations
• Cool use for CSS attribute selectors – Hiding banner ads with CSS
• Showing Hyperlink Cues with CSS
• Showing Hyperlink Cues with CSS

Download Internet Explorer 8

You can download Internet Explorer 8, Beta 1 from the Microsoft Developer site. However, here are a few things to keep in mind:

1. This installation takes some time, about 15 minutes, and will require a restart of your computer.
2. It will replace your existing Internet Explorer and is not available as a stand-alone browser.
3. It renders in standards-mode as a default. You’ll see a button to render in IE7 mode. This is helpful to see the changes between the versions.
4. Many sites will have significant layout issues in the standard view. You may need to re-evaluate your conditional comments to specify IE7 instead of greater than IE6
5. IE8 is ignoring the * hack! This means you can use the underscore hack for IE6, the * hack for IE6 and IE7 and … um… I don’t know yet for IE8.

Is IE8 better than IE7?

• Internet Explorer 8 passes the Acid2 Test.
• It understands CSS attribute selectors and generated content.
  IE8 handles my international test page fine.
• It understands :hover on non-links but is still buggy. Here’s a good test page with multiple CSS3 styles.
• It seems to have more integration with social platforms, maps, etc. Perhaps this is a nod towards Flock?

It’s still really early to find all of the bugs and benefits of the new browser. The team needs to be commended for the fast development and their willingness to listen to criticism and change the default behavior at such a late point. I look forward to the more mature releases.

Updates

• Leave it to Hedger Wang to find and document the first IE8 bug: See how IE8 breaks

Getting drunk on the possibilities and waking up to sober reality

It could be argued that 2006 was the year of AJAX and DHTML. They matured this year and solid libraries were released. The Yahoo User Interface Library makes a JavaScript mangler like me seem downright competent. Not only that, it’s got some good accessibility and security built in. Gez Lemon and others have been tearing apart AJAX for a possible accessibility hook that makes all of us happy. JSON gave us new ways to transfer information.

Yes, we got giddy with the possibilities. I helped build Yahoo! Tech. It’s a great site, if I do say so myself. We launched with every flash, web 2.0, animation, AJAX driven widget imaginable. Someone even called it “an explosion of a web 2.0 factory.” The site was accessible, harnessed the powers of a web-service architecture, and was the first completely new site for Yahoo! Media in a long time. But the web 2.0-ification was the star in many people’s eyes.

A funny thing happened over the months after launching. We got rid of the flash on the home page. We removed the dynamic width widget. We removed some animations. We began removing these Web 2.0 stars because the users didn’t use them AND they made the site performance horrible. Yahoo Tech, like many other sites, learned an age-old lesson. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

Prediction #1 – In 2007, AJAX and DHTML will be used reasonably.

I predict new sets of AJAX/DHTML libraries will be released with great features and accessibility. People will go gaga over a few sparkly ideas and ultimately settle with good sites that use the libraries reasonably. I predict AJAX will be used less often as commercial sites realize they need page refreshes for advertising revenue. AJAX will continue to be used for features that significantly help the user’s experience (Yahoo Finance Streaming Quotes) and not so much for page level mechanisms (Yahoo! Tech Search).

No More Rounded Corners

I hate rounded corners. They were fashionable for a year and everyone had to have them. You could build them with 15 nested divs, with javascript, with extra paragraphs, extra this, that and the other. Die rounded corners die!

Seriously, rounded corners add a bit of visual white space but they’ve gone overboard. They’ve hit the designer’s toolkit like a bad font and are being used because people feel like that have to use them. It’s time to be creative again and kill rounded corners. Please!

Prediction #2: Rounded Corners Replaced With Dancing Hamsters

Let’s look at alternate container variations. Put rounded corners on the shelf next to drop shadows and let’s explore line quality, tonality, texture, and contrast instead.

Accessibility is a big deal and then it isn’t

Accessibility for web sites will become a big deal in 2007 as the Target lawsuit comes back and someone figures out a way to make AJAX accessible and easy to implement. I’m putting my money on Gez Lemon finding a solution and the Yahoo! User Interface Library making it available.

Firefox, Apple, Yahoo!, Google, IBM, Sun, and who knows what other companies will come together and agree that there is a particular way that these things should be done and will create some resolutions. After these things happen, you will see more and more sites become accessible without even trying. Platforms such as WordPress have already made huge impacts in setting up sites to be accessible from the beginning. Look for more advances from Microsoft, Adobe, and more.

Apple will release their new OS with extended assistive technologies built-in. Existing screen reader companies will have to deal with a big new competitor. Watch for Jaws, et al to scurry around fixing outstanding issues to hold onto their audience.

Prediction #3 – Accessibility for All

Even if JaneDoe43 is simply dragging images into her MyLinkedInSpace page, it will have the hooks necessary to be accessible. Platforms and libraries will make it easier for people to worry more about content and less about rules. The web will be a better place for novice and advanced programmers. It will certainly be better for those that need assistive technologies.

IE7 opens the possibilities

Internet Explorer 7 has been released and will soon see adoption rates increase significantly. Vista is ready to also increase the graphic processing potential for millions of users. As web developers, we have new tools in our kit to work with. Start studying your attribute selectors, pseudo selectors, and playing with alpha transparencies. 2007 will see the death of Internet Explorer 6. It will still sit on a small percentage of machines, but IE7 will take over and with it comes hope.

Prediction #4: CSS2 and CSS3 Get Used

Start looking at progressive enhancements with your CSS. Give Firefox, Opera, Safari, and IE7 the best possible experience. You may have to dumb down some of the IE6 images but go for the beauty and simplicity that advanced CSS offers.

Where’s the new blood?

The standardistas of the past are busy working on big projects now. Sure, they’re still doing some innovative stuff. But where are the young guns inventing wonders like Son of Suckerfish, Microformats, CSS Zen Garden,Image Replacement, SIFR, and god-forbid the image-free rounded corners? Seriously, it’s time for some exciting developments to come from people recently discovering web standards and bringing a new approach to solving issues. Who knows who will be the next Erik Meyer, Big John, Andy Budd, Shaun Inman, PPK, etc. Who’s gonna carry Joe Clark’s torch for being the genius with a cattle prod as he solves the captioning dilemna next year?

Prediction #5 – New Standardistas Rock The House

Further, these new standardistas are going to come from Asia, India, South America, and possibly the United States and Europe. They’ll have us on the edge of our seat as AListApart releases the latest tools to completely change the way we build sites. My number one pick for standardista of the future goes to Hedger Wang who tirelessly experiments and publishes little teasers on a regular basis.

I can picture the @media 2008 conference in Singapore with Molly, Andy, PPK, et al lining up for a chance to rub shoulders with the new greats.

Take a look at the list and think of it as new tools to use.

Bugs we fixed

All bugs on positioniseverything.net except the “escaping floats” bug (which is planned for the future)

• Peekaboo Bug
• Internet Explorer and Expanding Box Problem
• Quirky Percentages
• Line-height bug
• Border Chaos
• Disappearing List-Background bug
• Guillotine Bug
• Unscrollable Content bug
• Duplicate Characters Bug
• IE and Italics
• Doubled Float-Margin bug
• Duplicate Indent bug
• Three pixel text jog
• Creeping Text bug
• Missing First letter bug
• Phantom box bug

Details on some of the other bugs (from sources other than the positioniseverything.net list) that we fixed:

• Overflow now works correctly! (That means boxes do not automatically grow any more.)
• Parser bugs: * html, _property and /**/ comment bug
• Select control: CSS style-able and not always on top
• Auto-sizing of absolute positioned element with width:auto and right & left (great for 3 column layouts)
• Addressed many relative positioning issues
• Addressed many absolute positioned issues
• % calculations for height/width for abs positioned elements http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=191182
• <?xml> prolog no longer causes quirks mode
• HTML element truly independent of the Body (now gets its own width, height etc.)
• 1 px dotted borders no longer render as dashed
• Bottom margin bug on hover does not collapse margins
• Several negative margin issues fixed
• Recalc issues including relative positioning and/or negative margins are fixed now
• CLSID attribute of <object> tag no longer limited to 128 characters
• :first-letter whitespace bug described in http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/09/02/460115.aspx fixed
• Descendant selector now works properly for grand children when combined with other selectors
• First-line and first-letter now applies when there is no space between word :first-line and opening brace {
• Pseudo-classes now are working as expected if selector is excluded
• The :link selector works now for anchor tag with href set to bookmark
• Addressed !important issues
• PositionIsEverything piefecta-rigid.htm now works
• List-item whitespace bug fixed
• Fixed Absolutely Buggy II
• Absolute positioned elements now use always correct containing block for positioning and size information
• Nested block elements now respect all overflow declarations (hidden, scroll, etc)
• Fixed the opposing offset problem (absolute positioned element whit all four top, bottom left and right are present)
• <a> tags nested within LI elements will no longer add extra bottom margin when hover occurs
• We no longer lose the image aspect ratio on refresh
• Cleaned up our ident parsing according to CSS2.1 rules
• Fixed parsing bugs for multi- class selectors and class selectors that are combined with id selectors
• And many more

We also extended our existing implementations to comply with W3C specifications:

• Enable :hover on all elements not just on <a>
• Background-attachment: fixed works on all elements – so Eric Meyer’s complexspiral demo works
• Improved <object> fallback

Finally, we added new features from CSS2.1:

• Min/max width/height support (also for images, which did not work in IE7b2)
• Transparent borders
• Fixed positioning support
• Selectors: first-child, adjacent, attribute, child
  • A couple of CSS 3 attribute selectors: prefix, suffix and substring since we were working already in the code base (also the general sibling selector)
• Alpha channel PNG support (Not a CSS feature but too important for designers to not call it out J)

IE Blog

IE7 is still not as good as Firefox, Opera, or Safari. However, Microsoft is planning an aggressive updating campaign and hopefully it won’t be long before we can count on our average user’s browser supporting advanced CSS styles. It’s time to stop complaining about IE6 and begin planning how you will use these new tools.

Sébastien Guillon, recently wrote a post about using the CSS2 attribute selector and content rule
to let visitors know what to expect when clicking on a link to an international web site. Inspired by his approach, I’ve simplified some of the code and added background images to
represent the countries.

Guillon’s original project focused on adding a text description after the link in the site’s native language. To do this, he used a set of descending selectors to look at the page’s language declaration and the link’s hreflang attribute. I am assuming the site that hosts this CSS is in english. However, it would not be difficult for you to simply change the generated content if your site is written in French, Spanish,
Swahili, etc.

Sample list of international Yahoo sites

Europe

• Catalan
• Denmark
• France
• Germany
• Greece
• Italy
• Norway
• Spain
• Sweden
• UK
• Ireland

Now look at the final version with new CSS. Internet Explorer users will not see a difference, try Firefox or Opera. Internet Explorer 7 beta 2 shows the flags but does not show the generated content.

The hreflang Attribute

The hreflang allows the user/browser to define the language of a link’s targeted page to avoid presenting
unreadable information:

The hreflang attribute provides user agents with information about the language of a resource at the end of a link, just as the lang attribute provides information about the language of an element’s content or attribute values.

W3C.org

The hreflang attribute defines the language of the web site you are sending someone to. The language is defined with a two letter abbreviation, such as en, fr, sp… You can also define the locality of this language by adding the country code to this language. This is particularly helpful for languages that have dialects. A Mexican site would have this attribute: hreflang=”sp-mx”.

The Attribute Selector

CSS2 allows us to look for tags that contain specific attributes. We can look for blockquotes with cite attributes, tables with summaries, table cells with header attributes,
and our little friend, the link with an hreflang attribute.


/*English */
a[hreflang="en"]:after, a[hreflang|="en"]:after {content:"\A0(In English)";}


Breaking it down

This rule uses a combination of attribute selector and pseudo-class to transform the link from common to fabulous.

a[…]

Look for a link with an attribute

hreflang=”en”

The hreflang attribute must include the letters “en”. This allows the CSS to work on links that do not define a country variation

:after

This pseudoselector defines the space after the link

{content:”\A0(In English)”;}

After the link, place the following text: (In English)

hreflang|=”en”

The hreflang attribute must include the letters “en” within a hyphenated set, i.e. en-us, en-ca, …

Adding the flag

Now that we’ve notified the user about what language the link will be in, let’s tell them the country the site is from. Once again, we will look at the hreflang attribute for this information. This rule is not as neat and tidy. For each country, we are going to look for all of the possible language attributes. For instance, Canadian links could have hreflang=”fr-ca” and hreflang=”en-ca”.


/*Canada */
a[hreflang="en-ca"], a[hreflang="fr-ca"] {background:URL(flag-sprite.png) no-repeat 0 0; padding-left:35px;}


This time, we will give links that have Canadian country codes 35px padding to the left side and a background image of the Canadian flag that sits to the
left edge of the link’s text. This style sheet is using an image sprite to keep the server requests to a minimum. See the Alistapart.com article about using
image sprites for more information on this technique.

Et Voilà

There we have it. A set of international links with the country of origin and language clearly defined. All of this has been made possible by our friends, the
attribute selector, the pseudo-class, and the content style. Tune in next week as we learn how to make a cruise ship out of two
shoe-boxes and an XML schema.

Fine Print

This has not been tested in Safari, but it shouldn’t be a problem. The pretty and useful presentation elements will not appear in IE6, NN4, and probably
most alternative devices (My Treo shows the flags but not the added content). I do not know how assistive devices would render these styles, more than likely they would be ignored. This project falls under
the “build for the best, don’t hurt the rest™” protocol.

Resources

• W3C Selectors
• Exploiter les langues avec les pseudo-classes CSS
• A tribute to selectors – Andy Clarke
• Attribute Selectors Part II – Eric Meyers
• hreflang resources – Standardistas

Rolling out IE7

Microsoft has an aggressive agenda to upgrade people from IE6 to IE7. By the end of Fall, we should see a significant percentage of our web site visitors using IE7 and by the end of the year, the majority of our traffic will be IE7. Those without IE7 are machines with illegal copies of XP, people with XP Service Pack 1, and those that don’t accept Microsoft service updates.

Use real CSS

If you are working on a site now, begin using real CSS.

• Use child selectors, first-child, attribute selectors, etc.
• Hover your list items and more. IE7 supports the hover pseudoclass on more than the link.
• IE7 offers full support of alpha transparent PNG graphics, so begin using them as well.

Forget what you knew about “* HTML”, those hacks now belong in a style sheet that is introduced via a conditional comment. They are gone, kaput, zilch. Sure, they’ll still work on IE6, but you’re going to have one heck of a nightmare keeping track.

Test Sites

I am a big fan of All that malarkey (Andy Clarke). However, his site is full of special rules for IE6 and its a great testing ground to see what IE7 chokes on and what it does as good as Firefox, Opera, and Safari. If your site is fairly hack free, you probably won’t notice a difference going from Firefox to IE7 Beta 2. Start hunting around and finding the errors.

What is still broken on IE7

There are two major issues that I have with IE7.

1. No generated content. You can’t use CSS to add checkmarks to visited links, clearing containers spans, etc.
2. Double float margin still exists. This can be fixed by adding display:inline to your floated objects when this problem occurs.
3. While I haven’t been able to nail down the specifics, there seems to be some bugginess with positioning absolute/relative.

I’m sure there will be much better analysis of this launch by PositionIsEverything, Quirksmode, and the IE7blog. I hope these scribbled notes help you move forward. IE7 is a good thing. It’s not perfect, but damn it sure is nice to ditch the son of suckerfish javascript, class=”firstitem”, haloed transparent gifs, et al.

I forgot to mention, IE7 replaces IE6 on your computer. You need to have an extra computer to continue testing your pages in IE6. If you only have one windows box, I’d suggest keeping IE6 on that and just program for Firefox, et al and placing your IE6 hacks in a conditional comment linked style sheet

– This was originally published on tdrake.net