Snippets

These two make the point (hilariously) that in almost every instance, there is a better widget or design pattern you could be using than a drop down.

A new value of the display property has landed in Chrome Canary and Firefox Nightlies. In the Editor’s Draft of the CSS Display Module Level 3, display: flow-root is defined as:

“The element generates a block container box, and lays out its contents using flow layout. It always establishes a new block formatting context for its contents.”

The key use of this comes when you have a box with a floated element inside it, and the floated element is taller than the other content inside the box. Default behaviour is that the box will not clear the float, and anything that comes afterwards will also wrap the floated item.

The typical way we have solved this issue is to use a clearfix hack. The hack inserts some generated content, sets it to display; table or display: block and then clears it. This then ensures that the box becomes self-clearing, in our example the border will display after the floated item, and any following content will not rise up to wrap the float.

Enter display: flow-root

Using display: flow-root on an element will perform this clearing for us. Instead of needing to apply the clearfix hack we can use the CSS display property on the container with a value of flow-root.

The border then clears the float and following content displays after our contained floated element.

[…]

There is some discussion about the name of the value on an issue posted to the CSS Working Group GitHub. If you want to see interoperable support for this feature soon, then I’d suggest you pop over to the Edge UserVoice site and give it a vote.

What it does

• Uses a real button as a control.
• Places the displayed content next in DOM order after the button.
• Uses some ARIA magic to augment the semantics and behaviour.
• Displays or dismisses content on click, press or tap (also dismisses on esc key press).
• Conveys state (collapsed or expanded) to AT users.
• When initially displayed content is announced by (most) screen readers that support aria-live.
• Screen readers users can also virtual cursor through and interact with the displayed content.
• keyboard only users can interact with controls in the displayed content.

What it does not do

Display content on mouse cursor hover.

View Toggletip demo on CodePen

Everyone who’s ever messed around with dates knows that they are terribly user-hostile — not only for software developers, but also for users. True, users will be able to tell you their date of birth or today’s date without trouble, but ask them to fill them out in a web form and they will encounter problems.

Month first, day first, or year first? And what about slashes, dashes, and other separators? Usually the website engineer has a strong personal preference and enforces it religiously upon unsuspecting users with stern and incomprehensible error messages in a lurid shade of red that are too tiny for anyone over 25 to read.

input type=”date”

In theory, there’s a solution to this problem: <input type=”date”>. It offers a special interface for picking dates, and it enforces a standard format for the value that’s sent to the server. Better still, the mobile browsers support it.

[…]

Here’s a test page for <input type=”date”> and a few related types. Remember that some don’t work in some browsers.

[…]

I think it’s time that we trust browser vendors a bit more. The days of useless features for the sake of having a longer feature list are long gone. Nowadays, browser vendors try to add features that are actually useful for users, and are actually implemented by web developers. If a browser says it supports <input type=”date”>, you should trust it to deliver a decent experience to its users. If it says it does not, and only in that case, you should use a custom widget instead.

[T]he data’s in now. The hamburger menu doesn’t work well, and it’s time for everyone to move on. At this point, there aren’t many good excuses for using them in new site designs, and it very well may be worth revisiting older sites to see if they might perform better with an updated navigation structure.

Exposing long navigation menus on small screens is tricky. Hamburger menus are everywhere, although often discouraged. Displaying “just enough” navigation at every breakpoint can feel like an impossible task. This is especially true for template developers needing to accommodate an arbitrary number of menu items.

The Priority+ design pattern seeks to display as many items as possible given an arbitrary screen width, while making the rest accessible via a single click. I’ll go over the implementation I worked on at Goshen College that includes both dropdown menus and horizontal scrolling, which I’ve yet to find in the wild: