Develop Reference

Shortening a link using HTML/JS/CSS

I am trying to change the design of the navigation on my site.
We have some products with really long names and I want to cut them short and maybe add (...) or something similar at the end.
So something like this should look like abcdefg... instead of abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
a{
width:50px;
overflow:hidden;
}
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
A JS solution is welcome.
I would also like to know why the width isn't being applied?

Use white-space combined with overflow & text-overflow. And don't forget to add display: inline-block to the a element, so you can apply width to it.
a {
display: inline-block;
width: 50px;
white-space: nowrap;
overflow: hidden;
text-overflow: ellipsis;
}
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

Anchors are inline elements by default and any width set on an anchor is ignored. Change the display to inline-block:
a {
width: 50px;
overflow: hidden;
display: inline-block;
}
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
As MDN states:
Inline elements are those which only occupy the space bounded by the
tags defining the element, instead of breaking the flow of the
content.
and...
You can change the visual presentation of an element using the CSS
display property. For example, by changing the value of display from
"inline" to "block", you can tell the browser to render the inline
element in a block box rather than an inline box, and vice versa.
Hovewer, doing this will not change the category and the content model
of the element. For example, even if the display of the span element
is changed to "block", it still would not allow to nest a div element
inside it.

Images not responsive by default in Twitter Bootstrap 3?

It looks like with the new version 3.0 I have to set the class names of an image to col-lg-4 col-sm-4 col-4 if the image is part of div with the same class names to make the image responsive with all breakpoints.
In version 2 the images CSS properties inherited by default the parent's div properties.
Is this correct?

Bootstrap 4
For Bootstrap 4 use Sass (SCSS):
// make images responisve by default
img {
#extend .img-fluid;
}
answer updated for version 3
Bootstrap 3 has a special class for responsive images (set max-width to 100%). This class is defined as:
.img-responsive {
display: block;
height: auto;
max-width: 100%;
}
Note img tag gets by default:
img {
vertical-align: middle;
border: 0;
page-break-inside: avoid;
max-width: 100% !important;
}
So use class="img-responsive" to make your images responsive.
To make all images responsive by default:
css: add the code below under the bootstrap css:
img {
display: block;
height: auto;
max-width: 100%;
}
less: add the code below in your mixins.less:
img {
&:extend(.img-responsive);
}
Note: requires Less 1.4.0. see: https://stackoverflow.com/a/15573240/1596547
Carousel
img tags inside a carousel are responsive by default
Semantic rules
See also the answer of #its-me (https://stackoverflow.com/a/18653778/1596547). Using the above to make all your images responsive by default turns your images to block level elements. Block level elements are not allowed in paragraphs (<p>), see: https://stackoverflow.com/a/4291515/1596547
As far as i understand the distinction of block-level vs. inline elements is replaced with a more complex set of content categories. See also: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Inline_elemente#Inline_vs._block-level.
So in HTML5 a p tag can contain any phrasing element intermixed with normal character data. (see: http://www.w3.org/TR/html-markup/p.html) The img tag is such a phrasing element. The img tag's default value for the display property is indeed inline-block. Changing the display property to block does not violate any of the preceding rules.
Block level elements (display:block) take all the available space of their parent, which seems exactly what you expect for responsive images. So setting display: block; seems a reasonable choice, which has to be preferred above the inline-block declaration.
Images inside p elements which require inline-block as suggest by #its-me (https://stackoverflow.com/a/18653778/1596547) should maybe not be responsive at all.

Excellent suggestion by #BassJobsen, but I'd use display: inline-block; instead of display: block; as that feels more semantic 1 (which means you can be a bit more sure you are not messing up somewhere else).
So, mine would look like this:
img {
display: inline-block;
height: auto;
max-width: 100%;
}
Please do let me know if my understanding is flawed. :)
[1]: For one, images are almost always wrapped in a block-level element if that's the use case; and then again, we also use images in elements like paragraphs (p), where an inline-block would be more appropriate than a block element.

Got here after trying to figure out if it's safe to apply img-responsive for all images.
The answer by #its_me led me to think that it isn't safe to apply this for images under a p element.
This does not seems to be what the bootstrap team think.
This is why images are not responsive by default in bootstrap3:
The summary is that it breaks a ton of unsuspecting third-party widgets (including Google Maps), which understandably don't anticipate the images within them being forcibly resized to other widths. This is why we rolled back Bootstrap v2's "images are responsive by default" approach in Bootstrap v3 in favor of an explicit .img-responsive class.
https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/issues/18178#issuecomment-154180107

My content is running off the bottom of my page

I am updating the webstore on my site to Ecwid. Since I used the Intuit Sitebuilder to build my site the page is a fixed size. I added a place holder in Sitebuilder to hold the script for the Ecwid store. However, some of the pages of my store run off of the bottom of the screen. I have contacted both Ecwid and Sitebuilder for help with this with no luck.
I need my store to be no longer than 1000px high and in the event one of the pages of the script is longer it will have a scrollbar to the left. Can someone please help me?
Here is a link to see what I am talking about: Dip Wizard Hydrographic Dip Kit Store.

You'll need to edit both html and css of your site:
html:
inside a div with id "element50", there's a div without an id. This is the container that you're worried about. You need to give this div an id, for example -
<div id="productInfo">
css: Then in your css - add these rules
#productInfo {
margin-top: 25px;
max-height: 1045px;
overflow-x: hidden;
overflow-y: scroll;
}
If this is very urgent and you can't find where to add/edit your css, you can add it in the html itself:
<div style="margin-top: 25px; max-height: 1045px; overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: scroll;
But this is not recommended and should be replaced with proper css in the near future.

If I understand you correctly you want a scrollbar where the content is over 1000px, then i guess you should type in your css {overflow-y:scroll;} on your content element.

adjusting height of div based on internal div

I have a set of divs like so:
<div id="textArea">
<div id="text"></div>
</div>
CSS properties:
#textArea {
height: auto !important;
min-height: 2em;
overflow: hidden;
}
#text{
display: none;
}
I'm filling in the div with the id of "text" with error messages coming back from a POST request using jQuery. The size of the data coming back is not static, but my problem is that the div is not adjusting.
I am basically trying to mimic the Ruby on Rails default flash message that will push divs further down the page with a dynamically adjusted div.

I think you are simply doing too much - A div should automatically expand to fit the text content inside it, unless you have a specific rule saying otherwise. Do you have a rule that specifies a height for all divs? Is that why you have the height: auto !important here? Are you using a reset stylesheet? Something external to these rules is affecting your divs.
Hope that this points you the right way.

Div's should update height and width automatically unless otherwise told to. What is your jQuery code to update the div? What are you using to reveal the div to the browser (since it's currently set to display:none)? Have you tried using firebug to inspect the elements?

counteracting existing styles

I have a div with a padding, created and styled by Javascript.
This div is created on a page with the following CSS rule:
div {
width: 100%;
}
This messes up, as it changes the width of my created div to what it naturally would be PLUS its padding (so I end up with buttons outside of the div borders). I can't statically set div widths because they depend on the content. So how can I overwrite this rule and bring it back to "default width"?

You need the following CSS:
div { width: auto; }
Since the CSS rule is applied through JavaScript, which causes it to be an inline style, you may have to use !important to make sure the new rule has a higher specificity so you can overwrite the old one.
div { width: auto !important; }
Of course, it would be even better if you could just edit the JavaScript so it wouldn’t add the style to the div anymore.