The accesskey attribute is a useful feature that allows users to navigate websites via the keyboard instead of a mouse. Unfortunately not knowing what accesskeys are associated with each link makes them of limited value. Revealing Accesskey Info is a new article demonstrating how to use the :before and :after pseudo-elements to selectively display the accesskey assignments to modern web browsers.
Building on what I thought of on Friday, I’ve created a pull-down menu using only CSS! Once again, this effect won’t work in IE, but should do so in other modern browsers.
The Search for the Missing Link is a new article demonstrating how to use CSS pseudo-classes to help users find hard to spot links on an otherwise well designed page. This is something I thought of just this morning, and you’ll need to use the newest version of Mozilla (1.3) to get the full effect!
Update:
Thanks to Jeffrey Zeldman for the link and kind words on his website, and thanks to everyone who sent in feedback on browser support. The technique has been confirmed to work in Opera 7, Safari, and Camino.
Some of my CSS techniques are featured in Andrew King’s new book Speed Up Your Site: Web Site Optimization. The product of years of research, the book shows you how to speed up your site from primarily a client-side perspective. You’ll learn how to optimize practically everything that goes into creating a web page, including (X)HTML, CSS, JavaScript, graphics, multimedia, and keywords. The book also covers the psychology of performance (response times and flow) plus advanced server-based techniques and compression.
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stuart@designmeme.com
