Tagged “disclosure”

Whether I’m thinking about inclusive hiding, hamburger menus or web components one UI pattern I keep revisiting is the disclosure widget. Perhaps it’s because you can use this small pattern to bring together so many other wider aspects of good web development. So for future reference, here’s a braindump of my knowledge and resources on the subject.

learn about semantic HTML, accessibility, and how using ARIA attributes can sometimes do more harm than good.

The HTML details element continues to gain fans and get developers’ juices flowing. Scott Jehl recently tweeted:

I love the details/summary HTML elements. So versatile. My favorite part is being able to show a collapsed state from the start without worrying about potential operability issues if JavaScript fails to run (since its behavior doesn't need it).

Scott goes on to describe how creating disclosure widgets (controls that hide and show stuff) with resilience in mind is so much more difficult when not using <details> since it can require complex progressive enhancement techniques. At the very least these involve making content available by default in case JavaScript fails, then hiding it when the disclosure widget script loads successfully, ideally without a jarring flash of content in between.

Jeremy Keith takes us through his thought process regarding the choice of link or button when planning accessible interactive disclosure elements.

A disclosure component is the formal name for the pattern where you click a button to reveal or hide content. This includes things like a “show more/show less” interaction for some descriptive text below a YouTube video, or a hamburger menu that reveals and hides when you click it.

The fairly-recently added <details> element is a great, native HTML way to toggle content visibility.

<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.</p>
<details>

<summary>System Requirements</summary>

<p>Requires a computer running an operating system. The computer

must have some memory and ideally some kind of long-term storage.</p>

</details>
<p class="end">Remember: built-in beats bolt-on, bigly!</p>
<!--

<details> is great but there are a few gotchas:

Not totally flexible design-wise
Unsuitable for accordions with multiple sibling elements unless you add some JS
Unsupported in IE 11 (but content is still available)

-->

:root {
font-size: 110%;
font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial,
  sans-serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji";


}
input,

button {

font-size: inherit;

}
.end {

margin-top: 2rem;

}