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

Jon Hall jonhall at ozline.net
Wed Mar 21 18:10:42 CST 2001


I've done this on a couple of web sites, in a backend administration area.
You can also use css to change the pointer to something other than the text
pointer so that the user gets the idea that it is clickable. However, since
IE's implementation of the pointer property is hosed, you will have to deal
with the pointer instead of the standard hand, if you want it to work in IE
and NS6.
You can make the rows clickable by doing a <span> around the <tr>'s and
applying your class to the span. There may be other ways but I have not
played with it enough.
Another option is just using the onClick or onDblClick events to do the
highlighting. This is a little more intuitive in my opinion. However, I dont
think any of these nice effects should be relied on.

jon


----- Original Message -----
From: "Joe Crawford" <jcrawford at avencom.com>
To: "evolt.org's "thelist"" <thelist at lists.evolt.org>
Sent: Wednesday, March 21, 2001 5:55 PM
Subject: [thelist] onmouseover in <tr> tags; drawbacks? cognitive issues?


> 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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