Background image for visited links

I’ve been a recent convert to Design Meltdown. The site disects a visual theme and gives examples on how to use them and where they are being used. While exploring the latest post about sketches for the web, I noticed an interesting approach to the visited pages.

The Breakdown

The site has a series of floated divs to display the screenshots. The screenshot is applied as the background image of the div with an inline style. Inside the div is a link that is given display:block and a transparent background image.

Great idea – room for improvement?

While I think the visual design for these screenshots is well thought-out. I don’t like the underlying code. The screenshots are content; miniature representations of other sites. Adding them to the CSS is treating them as decorative elements. The text for each link is: “SCREENSHOT, ” making the page unusable with the styles disabled. To give this page more structure and semantic strength, I would modify the underlying code as such:

HTML Code

CSS Code


.screenshotlist {float:left; list-style-type:none;}
.screenshotlist li {float:left; margin:9px; }
.screenshotlist a {display:block; width:146px; height:130px; position:relative; }
.screenshotlist a strong {text-indent:-1000em; z-index:20; position: absolute; top:0; left:0; width:100%; height:100%; background:url(screenshot.png) no-repeat -154px 0; }
.screenshotlist a:visited strong {background-position:0 0;}
.screenshotlist a img {margin:5px 0 0 5px; border:none; z-index:1;}


Benefits of the new code

The screenshots now have some structure; an unordered list with links full of good, crunchy content. Screenreaders and those without CSS will have access to the information. Javascript can be used to target links within the screenshotthumb div to open a new window without the need of inline scripting.

Cavaets: I haven’t tested this code yet. It’s very possible the z-index styles are not required. As an alternative, remove the margin on the image and replace it with a border. Add a rule to change the border color on hover and visited.

Design Meltdown is a great site for learning about design concepts. I’ve gleaned a number of nice ideas from them and would love to say I gave a bit of help back to them.