Please don't use a {outline:none;} | Hacker News Reader

Please don't use a {outline:none;}

outlinenone.com

I don't think it is good idea to use alternative styling for focus outlines. People who prefer navigating with their keyboards rely on their browser's native outline style for feedback. If you really must remove the outline, do it for hover and active states only, and leave the focus styling to the browser:

    a:hover, a:active { outline: none; }  /* Requires IE > 6 */

See Patrick Lauke's article for more tests and reading: http://people.opera.com/patrickl/experiments/keyboard/test

Recommending default outline style is the same as recommending a default blue link style. A designer will know how to make the focus style match the site design.

Deriving authority for this statement form Eric Meyer is misleading. Eric didn't say don't use outline: none, he said make sure you have focus styles.

Browser defaults are ugly and inconsistent. Ordering designers everywhere to not override that is like telling Picasso to paint realistically because some people find his work inaccessible.

Asking designers nicely to make sure they have elegant focus styles is both appealing to their ability and sensibility without insulting their creativity.

Has the text changed since you posted this? You're all but quoting them in your first paragraph, except they say it more emphatically.

> Browser defaults are ugly and inconsistent.

These defaults are extremely consistent within the same browser, and wast majority of normal people tend to use on browser for the most of their browsing.

For the record, Picasso's paintings are horrible. I have no idea why the dude is famous.

yesterday I was in the position of having to download the driver software for the logitech unified remote receiver in order to get my mouse working.

While I had a working keyboard, there was no way to move the mouse cursor.

I was wondering where the focus rectangle had gone and now I know. Very timely submission indeed.

In the end, I had to temporarily plug another mouse to actually navigate to the driver download page.

Windows Accessibility to the rescue!

Left ALT+left SHIFT+NUM LOCK: Toggles MouseKeys on and off

"Instead of using the mouse, you can use the arrow keys on your keyboard or the numeric keypad to move the mouse."

http://www.microsoft.com/enable/training/windowsvista/mousek...

Right. "Mousekeys to the rescue." The painful, awkward "got it takes forever to move the cursor... Ah! Missed!" rescue.

If Mousekeys is the solution, your problem is pretty bad.

If you have Firefox or Chrome there's an easier way to click links. In FF, hit ' and then start typing the text of a link - press enter once it matches. Chrome is similar but doesn't let you search within only links - but you can use ctrl-f to highlight a link, and press escape then enter.

I like this trend of making single-page domain names out of what would just be a blog post advocating something with clear points and logic. They feel like they'll have more impact when linking someone to them.

I know I have seen lots of these, but I can't really remember any of them now. I can think of http://two.sentenc.es/. What are some more examples?

Here is another: http://whatifgoogledoesit.com/

I dunno, random-generation pages like this or http://whatthefuckshouldimakefordinner.com (which has thrown me some neat recipes) seem a bit different from single-essay sites.

http://www.comicsanscriminal.com/

http://www.comicfuckingsans.com (my little parody of the comic sans hate)

http://foldr.com/

http://foldl.com/

http://giveupandusetables.com/

http://shouldiusetablesforlayout.com/

That page would look nicer if the text were vertically centered. I know a really easy way to do that using tables.

The winner, pehaps, for longest one-word domain name?

http://dowebsitesneedtolookexactlythesameineverybrowser.com/

aw man, I opened this in Fx and Ch, hoping they'd done some html acrobatics and got it displaying completely differently in each browser but, actually, their site looks exactly the same in every browser...

I think it's from a while back (it's Dan Cederholm's push to help people get over that concern).

Also Firefox and Chrome almost certainly aren't the browser people would be worried about in such a case. Break out a vm and try an older version of IE.

http://isthisyourpaperonsingleservingsites.com/

Youve been played. Its less about advocating anything but more about the page rank of the domains it links to. Lets not be naive. The content here is almost zero and could be summarized with one simple english sentence containing the word 'because'.

This is why I love Opera's shift+arrow navigation. There's a large outline that's added by Opera regardless of the style, and it's much more visually intuitive than tabbing along.

If I tap the Control key once, Konqueror will show tooltip letters at the side of each link on the page; it then enters a mode in which I can press a letter key to activate that link.

That's interesting... What if there are more than 36 links?

2 letters.

Opera has similar feature if you press / and type fragment of link label.

Firefox equivalent is '

"/" searches everything, "," searches links. Both very useful.

I expect that other browser will follow Opera and just stop supporting :focus {outline:none} if designers keep mindlessly copy Eric's reset.

I'm sure the author means well, but I doubt this passive approach (where everyone else has to fix the problem) combined with the irritating, holier-than-thou tone will get much traction.

A little greasemonkey script to add outline, along with some visual examples of would be far more effective way to advocate the issue.

Doing something that inconveniences or irritates people gets you griped at.

A greasemonkey script wouldn't "advocate" anything; its use would be the (admittedly reasonable) action of someone not waiting for everyone else to get a clue and do something right.

The browser defaults for outline are ugly, that's why so many people set outline to none. So, some visual examples that show sexy outline stylings seems a more reasonable approach.

The author dismisses all aesthetic concerns and loses credibility with the aesthetically minded people he's trying to convince.

That's a pretty poor title for an article.

It's a naive to blame it on the outline property. You can do whatever you want with the outline, just remember to make it do something else when it receives focus.

This applies both to input boxes as well as <a> tags.

I have a default styling when I code PSDs into HTML/CSS that makes all a:focus elements have an opacity of 0.8. It doesn't look as bad and insures that all <a> elements will have a focus behavior.

In theory, HTML5 (in the loose, HTML+CSS+JS sense) should reduce the need for outline:none. Before, it was necessary because any input using an image (for rounded corners, box shadows, etc) would look horrible with it.

Now, however, a majority of common input styles can be done using CSS- which is compatible with the browser's default outlining.

Usually "design vanity" or total ignorance of accessibility.

That's a pretty ignorant statement intended as fact. When designing and developing applications with advanced functionality, it is sometimes necessary to override the outline in favor of the intended user functionality. That is why you can set outline to zero or none.

Just peruse jQuery and stop being a standards fascist.

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