[thelist] onmouseover in <tr> tags; drawbacks? cognitive issues?

Joe Crawford jcrawford at avencom.com
Wed Mar 21 16:59:32 CST 2001


One of our programmers suggested something interesting - a mouseover for
rows of tabular data which is very large and hard to read - something
somewhat subtle, and an optional thing.

Here's a demo:
http://artlung.com/temp/tr-onmouseover-style.html

It works very nicely - in IE5/Windows, IE5/Mac, and Netscape 6.01/Win98
so far.

Concerns I have:
- will the onmouseover and onmouseout break in any browsers?
I'm using the className and background properties in this.

this.className='yellowThing';
and
this.style.background='#F00'
 (just as a test)

I like using "this" in this case - it sidesteps the getElementById and
document.all issues rather nicely.

One BIG question I have is one of interaction - the rollover effect
implies that these rows might be clickable - and I'm concerned about
introducing cognitive confusion when they are *not* clickable. :-\ My
presumption would be that if we did this we would have to make clickable
elements (links, buttons) would have to me more declaratively clickable
in some way.

I'm quite skeptical of putting events willy nilly on pages. Restraint is
really a goal here.
 
Anyone doing things like this and have feedback? 

Thanks,
	Joe
--
Joe Crawford ||||||||||||||       mailto:jcrawford at avencom.com
||||||||||||||||||||||||             http://www.avencom.com
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||      Avencom: Set Your Sites Higher




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