Bruce Lawson recently asked for ways to style a definition list in the common glossary format. This is one way to do it.

Bruce’s original post – css challenge – describes what he is after: a “glossary style” appearance with the term on the left and the definitions on the right. Some terms will have multiple definitions, definitions of varying length, and each new term should appear on a new line. A definition list is semantically correct for this kind of information, so there was to be no fiddling around with the HTML, and the browser requirements were for it to work in all modern browsers and IE 6+.

You can skip straight to the demo where some additional classes are included in the HTML in order to highlight each term-definition association.

The basic HTML

The basic HTML structure is a simple definition list and nothing more. There are some short, long, and multiple definitions for each term.

<h1>Styling definition lists</h1>
<dl>
  <dt>Cheese</dt>
  <dd>
    <p>Velit esse cillum dolore in reprehenderit in voluptate duis aute irure dolor. Consectetur adipisicing elit, excepteur sint occaecat sunt in culpa. Velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.</p>
    <p>Mollit anim id est laborum. Ut enim ad minim veniam, consectetur adipisicing elit, ullamco laboris nisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, sunt in culpa quis nostrud exercitation.</p>
  </dd>
  <dd>yummy!</dd>

  <dt>Building flexibility through spreading knowledge and self-organization, exploiting the productive lifecycle to experience a profound paradigm shift. Through the adoption of a proactive stance, the astute manager can adopt a position at the vanguard.</dt>
  <dd>balderdash</dd>;
  <dd>poppycock</dd>

  <dt>Aardvark</dt>
  <dd>never hurt anyone</dd>
</dl>

The styles

In order to get the required appearance in all browsers I had to use negative margins and a few conditional styles to get IE7 and IE6 to play along.

For the purposes of the demo I’ve placed all the styles in <style> blocks in the head of the document.

<style>
   dl {padding-left:300px;}
   dt {clear:both; float:left; width:260px; padding:10px; margin:0 0 2em -300px; font-weight:bold; color:#686663;}
   dd {float:left; width:100%; padding:10px 0; margin:0 0 2em;}
</styl>
<!--[if lte IE 7]>
<style>
   dt {display:inline; margin-bottom:0;}
   dd {float:none; width:auto;}
</style>
<![endif]-->

That’s it. The widths of the <dt> can be set in ems or percentages if the layout requires. The complete code is available in the demo and you are free to use this code.

This toad jumped out of the long grass near a pond and kindly let me take a few photographs of it.

The following is an interesting extract from Straw Dogs by John Gray (pp. 109–116) discussing some of the differences between Western and Taoist philosophical traditions.

The fetish of choice

For us, nothing is more important than to live as we choose. This is not because we value freedom more than people did in earlier times. It is because we have identified the good life with the chosen life.

For the pre-Socratic Greeks, the fact that our lives are framed by limits was what makes us human. Being born a mortal, in a given place and time, strong or weak, swift or slow, brave or cowardly, beautiful or ugly, suffering tragedy or being spared it – these features of our lives are given to us, they cannot be chosen. If the Greeks could have imagined a life without them, they could not have recognised it as that of a human being.

The ancient Greeks were right. The ideal of the chosen life does not square with how we live. We are not authors of our lives; we are not even part-authors of the events that mark us most deeply. Nearly everything that is most important in our lives is unchosen. The time and place we are born, our parents, the first language we speak – these are chance, not choice. It is the casual drift of things that shapes our most fateful relationships. The life of each of us is a chapter of accidents.

Personal autonomy is the work of our imagination, not the way we live. Yet we have been thrown into a time in which everything is provisional. New technologies alter our lives daily. The traditions of the past cannot be retrieved. At the same time we have little idea of what the future will bring. We are forced to live as if we were free.

The cult of choice reflects the fact that we must improvise our lives. That we cannot do otherwise is a mark of our unfreedom. Choice has become a fetish; but the mark of a fetish is that it is unchosen.

Animal virtues

The dominant Western view…teaches that humans are unlike other animals, which simply respond to the situations in which they find themselves. We can scrutinise our motives and impulses; we can know why we act as we do. By becoming ever more self-aware, we can approach a point at which our actions are the results of our choices. When we are fully conscious, everything we do will be done for reasons we can know. At that point, we will be authors of our lives.

This may seem fantastical, and so it is. Yet it is what we are taught by Socrates, Aristotle and Plato, Descartes, Spinoza and Marx. For all of them, consciousness is our very essence, and the good life means living as a fully conscious individual.

…

Western thought is fixated on the gap between what is and what ought to be. But in everyday life we do not scan our options beforehand, then enact the one that is best. We simply deal with whatever is at hand. …Different people follow different customs; but in acting without intention, we are not simply following habit. Intentionless acts occur in all sorts of situations, including those we have never come across before.

Outside the Western tradition, the Taoists of ancient China saw no gap between is and ought. Right action was whatever comes from a clear view of the situation. They did not follow moralists – in their day, Confucians – in wanting to fetter human beings with rules or principles. For Taoists, the good life is only the natural life lived skillfully. It has no particular purpose. It has nothing to do with the will, and it does not consist in trying to realise any ideal. Everything we do can be done more or less well; but if we act well it is not because we translate our intentions into deeds. It is because we deal skillfully with whatever needs to be done. The good life means living according to our natures and circumstances. There is nothing that says that it is bound to be the same for everybody, or that it must conform with ‘morality’.

In Taoist thought, the good life comes spontaneously; but spontaneity is far from simply acting on the impulses that occur to us. In Western traditions such as Romanticism, spontaneity is linked with subjectively. In Taoism it means acting dispassionately, on the basis of an objective view of the situation at hand. The common man cannot see things objectively, because his mind is clouded by anxiety about achieving his goals. Seeing clearly means not projecting our goals into the world; acting spontaneously means acting according to the needs of the situation. Western moralists will ask what is the purpose of such action, but for Taoists the good life has no purpose. It is like swimming in a whirlpool, responding to the currents as they come and go. ‘I enter with the inflow, and emerge with the outflow, follow the Way of the water, and do not impose my selfishness upon it. This is how I stay afloat in it,’ says the Chuang-Tzu.

In this view, ethics is simply a practical skill, like fishing or swimming. The core of ethics is not choice or conscious awareness, but the knack of knowing what to do. It is a skill that comes with practice and an empty mind. A.C. Graham explains:

The Taoist relaxes the body, calms the mind, loosens the grip of categories made habitual by naming, frees the current of thought for more fluid differentiations and assimilations, and instead of pondering choices lets the problems solve themselves as inclination spontaneously finds its own direction. …He does not have to make decisions based on standards of good and bad because, granted only that enlightenment is better than ignorance, it is self-evident that among spontaneous inclinations the one prevailing in the greatest clarity of mind, other things being equal, will be best, the one in accord with the Way.

Few humans beings have the knack of living well. Observing this, the Taoists looked to other animals as their guides to the good life. Animals in the wild know how to live, they do not need to think or choose. It is only when they are fettered by humans that they cease to live naturally.

As the Chuang-Tzu puts it, horses, when they live wild, eat grass and drink water; when they are content, they entwine their necks and rub each other. When angry, they turn their backs on each other and kick out. This is what horses know. But if harnessed together and lined up under constraints, they know how to look sideways and to arch their necks, to career around and try to spit out the bit and rid themselves of the reins.

For people in thrall to ‘morality’ , the good life means perpetual striving. For Taoists it means living effortlessly, according to our natures. The freest human being is not the one who acts on reasons he has chosen for himself, but one who never has to choose. Rather than agonising over alternatives, he responds effortlessly to situations as they arise. He lives not as he chooses but as he must. Such a human has the perfect freedom of a wild animal – or a machine. As the Lieh-Tzu says: ‘The highest man at rest is as though dead, in movement is like a machine. He knows neither why he is at rest nor why he is not, why he is in movement nor why he is not.’

The idea that freedom means becoming like a wild animal or machine is offensive to Western religious and humanist prejudices, but it is consistent with the most advanced scientific knowledge. A.C. Graham explains:

Taoism coincides with the scientific worldview at just those points where the latter most disturbs westerners rooted in the Christian tradition – the littleness of man in a vast universe; the inhuman Tao which all things follow, without purpose and indifferent to human needs; the transience of life, the impossibility of knowing what comes after death; unending change in which the possibility of progress is not even conceived; the relativity of values; a fatalism very close to determinism; even a suggestion that the human organism operates like a machine.

Autonomy means acting on reasons I have chosen; but the lesson of cognitive science is that there is no self to do the choosing. We are far more like machines and wild animals than we imagine. But we cannot attain the amoral selflessness of wild animals, or the choiceless automatism of machines. Perhaps we can learn to live more lightly, less burdened by morality. We cannot return to a purely spontaneous existence.

Using within-page links presses the jumped-to content right at the very top of the viewport. This can be a problem when using a fixed header. With a bit of hackery, there are some CSS methods to insert space between the top of the viewport and the target element within a page.

Demo: Jump links and viewport positioning

Known support: varies depending on method used.

This experiment is the result of a post Chris Coyier made on Forrst. Chris’ method was to add an empty span element to the target element, shift the id attribute onto the span, and then absolutely position the span somewhere above it’s parent element.

That method works but it requires changes to the HTML. The comments on Chris’ post suggested the use of psuedo-elements or padding. This experiment expands on, and combines, some of those suggestions to show the limitations of each method and document their browser support.

Simplest method

If you need to jump to an element with simple styling then using the :before pseudo-element is a quick and simple approach.

#target:before {
   content: "";
   display: block;
   height: 50px;
   margin: -30px 0 0;
}

The drawbacks are that it requires browser support for pseudo-elements and it will fail if the target element has a background colour, a repeated background image, padding-top, or border-top as part of its rule set.

More robust method

The more robust method uses a transparent border, negative margin, and the background-clip property. If a top border is required then it can be mimicked using a pseudo-element, as described in Multiple Backgrounds and Borders with CSS 2.1.

#target {
   position: relative;
   border-top: 52px solid transparent;
   margin: -30px 0 0;
   -webkit-background-clip: padding-box;
   -moz-background-clip: padding;
   background-clip: padding-box;
}

#target:before {
   content: "";
   position: absolute;
   top: -2px;
   left: 0;
   right: 0;
   border-top: 2px solid #ccc;
}

There are still drawbacks: it requires browser support for background-clip if there is a background color, gradient, or repeating image set on the target element; it requires browser support for pseudo-elements and their positioning if a top border is desired; and it interferes with the standard use of margins.

To see these methods in action – as well as more details on the code, browser support, and drawbacks – have a look at the demo page. Please let me know if you know of better techniques.

A new image replacement technique was recently added to the HTML5 Boilerplate project. This post explains how it works and how it compares to alternative image replacement techniques.

[15 December 2012] This technique is no longer used in HTML5 Boilerplate. It’s been replaced by another, more reliable approach.

Here’s the CSS behind the recent update to the image replacement helper class in HTML5 Boilerplate. It has also made its way into the Compass framework.

.ir {
  font: 0/0 a;
  text-shadow: none;
  color: transparent;
}

What does each declaration do?

• font:0/0 a – a shorthand property that zeros out the font size and line-height. The a value acts as a very short font-family (an idea taken from the BEM implementation of this method). The CSS validator complains that using 0/0 in the shorthand font property is not valid, but every browser accepts it and this appears to be an error in the validator. Using font:0px/0 a passes validation but it displayed as font:0/0 a in the code that the validator flags as valid.
• text-shadow:none – makes sure that any inherited text shadow is removed for the text. This prevents the chance of any text shadow colors showing over the background.
• color:transparent – needed for browsers than don’t completely crush the text to the point of being invisible. Safari 4 (extremely rare) is an example of such a browser. There may also be mobile browsers than require this declaration. IE6/7/8 don’t recognise this value for color, but fortunately IE7/8 don’t show any trace of the text. IE6 shows a faint trace.

In the HTML5 Boilerplate image replacement helper, we’ve also removed any border and background-color that may be on the element. This makes it easier to use the helper class on elements like button or with links that may included background or border properties as part of a design decision.

Benefits over text-indent methods

The new technique avoids various problems with any text-indent method, including the one proposed by Scott Kellum to avoid iPad 1 performance problems related to large negative text indents.

• Works in IE6/7 on inline-block elements. Techniques based on text indentation are basically “broken”, as shown by this test case: http://jsfiddle.net/necolas/QZvYa/show/
• Doesn’t result in any offscreen box being created. The text-indent methods result in a box being drawn (sometimes offscreen) for any text that have been negatively or positively indented. It can sometimes cause performance problems but the font-based method sidesteps those concerns.
• No need to specify a text-alignment and hide the overflow since the text is crushed to take up no space.
• No need to hide br or make all fallback HTML display:inline to get around the constraints of using a text indentation. This method is not affected by those problems.
• Fewer styles are needed as a result of these improvements.

Drawbacks

No image replacement hack is perfect.

• Leaves a very small trace of the text in IE6.
• This approach means that you cannot use em units for margins on elements that make use of this image replacement code. This is because the font size is set to 0.
• Windows-Eyes has a bug that prevents the reading of text hidden using this method. There are no problems with all other screenreaders that have been tested. Thanks to @jkiss for providing these detailed results and to @wilto for confirming this technique works for JAWS 12 in IE 6/7/8 and Firefox 4/5/6.
• Like so many IR methods, it doesn’t work when CSS is loaded but images are not.
• Text may not be hidden if a visitor is using a user style sheet which has explicitly set important font-size declarations for the element type on which you have applied the IR class.

It’s worth noting that the NIR image replacement technique avoids these drawbacks, but lacks support in IE6/7.

Closing comments

I’ve been using this technique without significant problems for nearly a year, ever since Jonathan Neal and I used it in a clearfix experiment. The BEM framework also makes use of it for their icon components. The core idea was even proposed back in 2003 but the browser quirks of the day may have prevented wider use.

If you come across any problems with this technique, please report them at the HTML5 Boilerplate GitHub issue tracker and include a test case when appropriate.

Translations

• Nouvelle méthode de remplacement de texte par une image

HDIL promoter is lodged in Arthur Road Central Jail

With a view to prevent him from acting in any manner prejudicial to the maintenance of public order, Naeem Akhtar detention is being extended, an order said.

Court wants decision on levying costs for transport of migrant workers

This has been the highest spike in the number of cases in the State in a single day, taking the number of cases to 1,678

All returnees are taken to centres from buses and trains

Briskin, Alan, 1954-

Swindling, Linda Byars, 1965-

Drake, Matthew, author

Plenert, Gerhard Johannes, author

Galliers, Robert, 1947-

Görög, Mihály, 1951-

Godfrey, Paul C., author

Stegmann, Juan Pablo

Kipfer, Markus H, author

Wegerich, Christine, author

Hamann, Gerrit, author

Kreilkamp, Edgar

Mellon, Elizabeth

Caudle, Gerrie

Bernstein, Aimee

Greene, Jeffrey R., author

Klein, Bente

Russell, Doug

Brown, Paul C

Sisakhti, Reza, author

Finney, Martha I., author

Dobson, Michael Singer, author

Weinl, Kerstin

Weinstein, Art, author

Munson, Chuck, author