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STYLE SHEETS

Dynamic Galleries with DOM and CSS
By: Chris Heilmann
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  • Rating: 4 stars4 stars4 stars4 stars4 stars / 20
    2005-01-31

    Table of Contents:
  • Dynamic Galleries with DOM and CSS
  • Basic Functionality of a Thumbnail Gallery
  • Old School Dynamic Galleries
  • Sketching our Gallery
  • The Javascript
  • The Stylesheet
  • A Sequential Gallery
  • Other options

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    Dynamic Galleries with DOM and CSS - Sketching our Gallery
    (Page 4 of 8 )

     

    The gallery we are about to create should have the following features: 

    • Clean, simple markup – The HTML developer should not need to add any extra information for our gallery to work.

    • Full accessibility – Users without Javascript should simply get the linked picture displayed in the browser. 
    The HTML Markup 

    In order to make scripts work without inline event calls, we need to use the Document Object Model (DOM) to reach what we want to enhance. To avoid extensive searching in the document, we wrap our gallery in an element with a certain ID, for example “thumbs.”  Each thumbnail will be contained in its own DIV, to allow for captions, should we want them, and is linked to the main image. 

    <div id=”thumbs”>

        <div>

    <a href="images/archway.jpg"><img src="images/tn_archway.jpg" alt="Archway with natural green roof" /></a>

    </div>

    </div> 

    You might wonder why we don’t use a table for a thumbnail gallery, as technically a gallery with captions could be seen as tabular data. Furthermore a table degrades as a grid layout in non-CSS capable browsers, and our example shows up as one thumb under the other in those. The reason is that it is easier to maintain, renders faster and could be designed as liquid, something you cannot do with a table.

    The script we are about to create can take both, so if you feel more comfortable using tables, go for it. 

    In terms of accessibility, our example is perfectly acceptable. The nature of thumbnail galleries makes them not much use to blind or text browser users, but by giving the thumbnails a proper alternative text, even those users know what is linked. We could add a title to the links stating that it links to an image, though. Keyboard users have no problem with the gallery either –- they can tab from link to link (or press A in Opera), and hit enter to load the image. Pressing “Ctrl + Cursor Left” gets them back to the gallery. 

    More Style Sheets Articles
    More By Chris Heilmann


       ·  Hi Chris, Nice article! I liked a lot the use of the DOM approach....
       · I liked the article a lot but a copy of the source code and style sheet would be...
       · [url]http://icant.co.uk/articles/dyngallery/dyngallery.zip[/url], however without...
       · Thanks for the link to the zip file.The source files just lets me see how it all...
       · Hi! Great article you have there! Honestly, it's my first time to see this kind of...
       · Guess I'm not the "Anonymous Loozah" :) but I have a comment on this article and the...
       · And it works perfectly here... Netscape 4.x should neither get a stylesheet nor...
       · This is a great article, but it is a pity, that the example doesnt work well in my...
       · The gallery works perfect on my firefox, on 3 different computers. Can you please...
       · It seems tha href is not removed corectly, because it starts a function but...
       · I forget to say, that the problem on my firefox could be with tab browser extension,...
       · Script works great on IE, but I can't adjust the positioning of the big pic in...
       · You got a URL where we can see the problem?
       · Here's the URL (temporarily,...
       · 1) Your pages are in quirksmode2) Your HTML is tagsoup :)...
       · Thanks for your response. The page is now fixed and validating with a HTML 4.01...
       · I love this article as it produces exactly what I am looking for. The only thing is...
       · This script was the best way to do a gallery that I could find - others seemed to...
       · Please fix the floating ads on the right side of the screen. They are floating over...
     

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