Adapting to the Environment
CSS2 offers the ability to both alter the browser’s environment and integrate its look more closely to that of the user’s operating system.
Cursors
To achieve the former, we have the
cursor
property, which lets you declare what shape the
browser’s cursor will take as it
passes over a given element. Want to make a humorous point about
download times? Change the cursor to the wait cursor (an hourglass or
watch) when the cursor passes over hyperlinks. You can even hook this
property up to “cursor files” (which are not defined by
the specification), so you could theoretically class your anchors
based on where they go and load different icons for each type of
link. For example, off-site links could cause the cursor to change
into a globe, while links intended to provide help could trigger a
question-mark cursor.
Colors
In order to let web pages more
closely match the user’s desktop environment, there are a whole
list of new color keywords like button-highlight
,
three-d-shadow
, and gray-text
.
These are all intended to use the colors of the user’s
operating system. In all, there are 27 of these new color keywords. I
won’t list them all out here, but they’re listed in Table 10-1, found at the end of this chapter.
Outlines
While you’re moving your cursor around, you might want to show where the focus is set. For example, it might be nice to define a button so that it gets a red box around it when the cursor moves over it. Well, there a number of outline properties, ...
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