Articles Tagged links

Andy covers a technique where a semantic <button></button> is used within a card component, but really, the whole card is clickable. The trick is to put a pseudo-element that goes beyond the button, covering the entire card. The tradeoff is that the pseudo-element sits on top of the text, so text selection is hampered a bit. I believe this is better than making the whole dang area a <button></button> because that would sacrifice semantics and likely cause extreme weirdness for … Read article

Different website designs often call for a shape other than a square or rectangle to respond to a click event. Perhaps your site has some kind of tilted or curved banner where the click area would be awkwardly large as a straight rectangle. Or you have a large uniquely shaped logo where you only want that unique shape to be clickable. Or you have an interactive image that responds differently when different regions of it are clicked.

You can surround … Read article

It's a cool little effect. The default link style has an underline (which is a good idea) and then on :hover you see the underline essentially thicken up turning into almost what it would have looked liked if you used a background-color on the link instead.

Here's an example of the effect on the Superfriendly site:… Read article

Before we come to how to style underlines, we should answer the question: should we underline?

In graphic design, underlines are generally seen as unsophisticated. There are nicer ways to draw emphasis, to establish hierarchy, and to demarcate titles.

That’s clear in this advice from Butterick’s "Practical Typography":

If you feel the urge to underline, use bold or italic instead. In special situations, like headings, you can also consider using all caps, small caps, or changing the point

The other day I posted an image, quite literally as a thought exercise, about how you might accomplish "nested" links. That is, a big container that is linked to one URL that contains a smaller container or text link inside of it that goes to another URL. That's harder than it might seem at first glance. The main reason being that...

<!-- this is invalid and won't render as expected -->
<a href="#one">
  Outside
  </a><a href="#two">
    Inside
  </a>

Eric Meyer … Read article

A designer I work with was presenting comps at a recent team meeting. She had done a wonderful job piecing together the concept for a design system, from components to patterns and everything in between that would make any front-end developer happy.

But there was a teeny tiny detail in her work that caught my eye: the hover state for links was a squiggle.… Read article

Hyperlinks are the oldest and the most popular feature of the web. The word hypertext (which is the ht in http/s) means text having hyperlinks. The ability to link to other people’s hypertext made the web, a web — a set of connected pages. This fundamental feature has made the web a very powerful platform and it is obvious that the world of apps needs this feature. All modern platforms support a way for apps to register a URI… Read article

You are probably well acquainted with how links looks without any styling at all. That blue. That underline. That's a link in it's purest form. But what if we want to change things up a bit? Perhaps blue doesn't work with your website's design. Maybe you have an aversion to underlines. Whatever the reason, CSS lets us style links just like any other element.

The topic of disabling links popped up at my work the other day. Somehow, a "disabled" anchor style was added to our typography styles last year when I wasn't looking. There is a problem though: there is no real way to disable an <a></a> link (with a valid href attribute) in HTML. Not to mention, why would you even want to? Links are the basis of the web.

At a certain point, it looked like my co-workers were not going … Read article