CSS arrow please

http://cssarrowplease.com/

by jimsteinhart • 14 years ago

515 73 14 years ago

cssarrowplease.com

vanwilder77• 14 years ago

Loved the tool !!

chazandchaz• 14 years ago

Has a small line running through the arrow on safari (mobile). FYR

philo23• 14 years ago

That's probably because the CSS pixel resolution isn't matching the device/screen resolution so you're seeing the edge of two elements that don't quite match (imagine a percentage being rounded). If the page included a meta viewport tag with the correct default zoom level there would probably be no line (not tested) until you zoomed in or out.

jenius4• 14 years ago

For those who enjoy sass:

    =triangle($direction: up, $size: 10px, $color: #000)
      width: 0
      height: 0
      @if $direction == up
        border-left: $size solid transparent
        border-right: $size solid transparent
        border-bottom: $size solid $color
      @else if $direction == down
        border-left: $size solid transparent
        border-right: $size solid transparent
        border-top: $size solid $color
      @else if $direction == left
        border-top: $size solid transparent
        border-bottom: $size solid transparent
        border-right: $size solid $color
      @else if $direction == right
        border-top: $size solid transparent
        border-bottom: $size solid transparent
        border-left: $size solid $color

jacobr• 14 years ago

I normally use SCSS, but this should work as well.

    =triangle($direction: top, $size: 10px, $color: #000)
      width: 0
      height: 0
      border: $size solid transparent
      border-#{$dir}-color: $color

diminish• 14 years ago

css, sass and scss rocks. all those ideas should have their place in css3 or later.

rralian4• 14 years ago

While that's cool, it's not quite what the OP achieves. Using this mixin will turn whatever you apply it to into a solid-color triangle with the passed-in options. The triangle will need to be its own element.

OP adds two triangles to whatever it is applied to, one for the border color, another to cover it up with the background color. And it doesn't require any additional elements... it just adds these to whatever you are applying it to.

jenius4• 14 years ago

You're totally right. I have a mixin that makes a bubble like that too, but it's built from a few different mixins that each build on each other and I didn't want to post a buttload of code in a comment. You can see an example of how mine looks if you hit this page (http://roots.carrotbeta.com/docs/) and scroll down to the UI section

mikegerwitz2• 14 years ago

I love the creativity that results from CSS' limitations (or, arguably, its flexibility). Neat trick.

It took me a moment to realize exactly what was going on to make this work. For those interested: borders are styled in such a way that they angle toward the edges if the border is large enough:

  \ /
  / \

That gives you four "V"s to work with. Therefore, to create the arrow, you simply need to hide all but the appropriate border. The border around the arrow is accomplished by underlaying another "V".

stuff4ben• 14 years ago

I still don't get it. What do you mean that "borders are styled in such a way that they angle toward the edges if the border is large enough"? What causes the angle?

growt• 14 years ago

Take a look at this: http://jtauber.github.com/articles/css-hexagon.html

mikegerwitz2• 14 years ago

growt's link does an excellent job of illustrating it.

Ultimately, how the border is joined at the corners is undefined by the specification:

  http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-background/#border-style

> Note: This specification does not define how borders of different styles should be joined in the corner. [...]

Many rendering engines will join borders at an angle, producing those diagonal lines.

anons2011• 14 years ago

The demo page is broken in IE8, although it does work when you copy the HTML/CSS to a new file.

raganwald• 14 years ago

The demo page is broken in IE8

I prefer to say that “IE8 is broken when attempting to render the demo page,” but either way, good catch.

tomelders• 14 years ago

wrap it up in a cocoa app please, so I can use it when I'm not online.

prezjordan• 14 years ago

File -> Save Page As?

ericax• 14 years ago

Arrow is repeated too many times nowadays. Neat.

Teapot• 14 years ago

I was going to use an CSS tool today, but, then i took an arrow to the knee.

oe2• 14 years ago

This is the way to do it, until the graphics guy wants the box to have a drop shadow. The pseudo elements' shadow is square, so your options are either to hope that nobody notices that the arrow doesn't have a shadow (like in this example), or to use an image for the arrow.

kapowaz• 14 years ago

The gathered troops here were all cooing at this demo until the drop shadow was noticed as absent from the arrow. A real shame (although obviously the box-shadow being bounded by the rectangle makes it impossible to do this way).

Maybe it's time to propose a mask-shadow property?

cfontes2• 14 years ago

This made me to the sky and back to hell in one second.

I need to do exactly this in a google maps infobox, BUT with the dawn shadow... :( back to images I guess.

mcsheffrey• 14 years ago

Here's a method I use for getting box-shadows on the arrow http://tinkerbin.com/cRhPGwmh

cfontes2• 14 years ago

Thanks, but I cannot see the shadow in it.

shawnc• 14 years ago

You know, not having a shadow on the Arrow (if arrow is on bottom) kind looks like it's popping off the page then, at a slight angle. I don't mind it - tho obviously not for every use.

bgarbiak• 14 years ago

Here's a quick hack for a CSS arrow that casts a shadow. http://jsfiddle.net/BKtnn/1/

Adding border is a bit problematic but I'm sure solution could be found, just a question of few more minutes. Also, it should be doable in IE with filters.

oe2• 14 years ago

Yes, the designer in this project naturally wanted both a border and a box shadow. I don't know how to accomplish that in CSS without using additional elements. I'm currently using strategy #1, hoping that nobody notices :)

btipling• 14 years ago

This solution doesn't work. This has a overlapping shadow issue right around where the arrow pops out of the box. It doesn't look as obvious on that tiny shadow you have, on wider shadows it is glaringly obvious and looks terrible.

golden_apples• 14 years ago

That looks surprisingly good for me in Firefox, but from my experiments making these tricks work in production, browser standardization is a long way from the point where we can do this at arbitrary sizes in the real world.

The problem, more than anything, is the way these css-only triangles get aliased. Since they're a side-effect of rendering borders, they never get properly anti-aliased the way fonts and shape edges do, and as a result the edges end up jagged at certain sizes and color combinations.

lnanek• 14 years ago

This sort of thing used to happen a lot at an Android app company I worked for. It would be easier and cleaner to implement something like a button background in XML, but it wouldn't look nearly as good as a button produced using real graphics. It wasn't just looks either, they were less usable in that case. If a button doesn't look 3D due to being limited to a simple linear gradient or something then users are less likely to click it, and we did have user testing reports of people mistaking the biggest buttons that we wanted people to click most for section titles. So even if a shadow can be pulled off, what else is missing that a raster graphics solution would include. ;/

rralian4• 14 years ago

That's so funny... just yesterday I built my own sass mixin to create custom triangles to do the little arrow pointer on a dialog box like this. Two triangles (border color and background color) with an offset. I toyed with using :before and/or :after to create the second background-color triangle, but the specs said you could only do text or an image so I didn't even try to make the triangle. My version required something like <div class="arrow arrow-left"><div class="arrow-inner arrow-inner-left"></div></div>. This is so much more semantic, elegant, and awesome. I love it!

gioele• 14 years ago

I would not call this _more semantic_.

It is definitely a very cool and clean hack (more of these on HN, please), but not semantic at all: in the source there is not indication that the box is pointing at something or where it is pointing.

Looking at the domain name I thought it was a public request for a new CSS property like

  p {
      border-bottom-right-cap: solid-arrow-outward;
  }

rralian4• 14 years ago

I think it's more semantic than a non-content div or image that has no real semantic content, which is what my solution (and most I've seen) amounted to. I suppose ideally some property on the dialog container like 'data-refersto="#indicatedContent"' would be a little more semantic. And eventually that could be implemented directly in HTML and stylable in CSS. That'd be neat.

NickLarsen• 14 years ago

This needs 2 easy additions, a slider to move the arrow closer to either corner of the edge it's on and a slider to change how big the arrow is.

chrisacky• 14 years ago

I've also just converted to LessCSS mixin. Free for your use. (I added a 6th argument so that you can change the class name that gets generated).

Clickable: https://gist.github.com/2644661

    .arrowgasm(@position: top, @size : "4px", @background-color :  #88b7d5, 
       @border-width: "2px", @border-color : #c2e1f5, @arrowClass : "arrow_box"){
      
         (~".@{arrowClass}") {
            position: relative;
            background: @background-color;
            border: @size solid @border-color;
        }
        (~".@{arrowClass}:after"), (~".@{arrowClass}:before") {
                bottom: 100%;
                border: solid transparent;
                content: " ";
                height: 0;
                width: 0;
                position: absolute;
                pointer-events: none;
        }

        (~".@{arrowClass}:after") {
                .b(@position, @background-color);
                border-width: @size;
                left: 50%;
                margin-left: @size * -1;
        }
        (~".@{arrowClass}:before") {
               .b(@position, @border-color);
                border-width: @size + @border-width ;
                left: 50%;
                margin-left: ( @size + @border-width ) * -1;
        }
        .b(top, @border-color)   { border-bottom-color: @border-color; }
        .b(right, @border-color) { border-left-color: @border-color;   }
        .b(bottom, @border-color){ border-top-color: @border-color;    }
        .b(left, @border-color)  { border-right-color: @border-color; }
    }

scizo• 14 years ago

You might also want to consider explicitly setting the box-sizing to content-box. I know that is the default, but if someone attempted to use this and had already adjusted the box-sizing to something else it would not work.

esrauch• 14 years ago

There are dozens of rules someone could already have on the page that would break it, why make a special case for box-sizing?

richardlblair2• 14 years ago

I really suck at CSS. I mean, I really suck. It takes me forever to accomplish the smallest things. I love these sites that keep popping up that generate CSS for cool little effects.

Thanks!

kjhughes• 14 years ago

This and other utility and howto sites are very helpful, agreed.

BTW, to hone your CSS skills, try dropping into Firebug or Chrome's developer tools and just playing around -- very easy way to learn and get CSS stuff done. The CSS panel lets you change rules and values and see the effects immediately. I know in Chrome I use the up/down arrows on a value to slide objects and spacing around on the screen regularly. The panel also helps greatly in understanding cascading; see also the "computed styles" section.

freditup3• 14 years ago

Yup, I suck at CSS too. I still think there's something fundamentally wrong with it, but that's probably more a marker on my own ignorance than anything.

Anyway, I do have fun playing around with the FF style tools. It is quite cool and informative.

dlikhten• 14 years ago

May I request that the arrow has a drop shadow too. I mean this is not exactly rocket science, but the drop shadow will be much tougher.

optymizer• 14 years ago

Because the shadow seems to be setup so that the light source is at the top, when you move the arrow to any other position, the lack of shadow under the arrow becomes noticeable.

If the light source moved along with the triangle, no shadow under the arrow would be required (imo).

yanis• 14 years ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3948850

bratsche• 14 years ago

I posted a Sass mixin for doing this here: https://gist.github.com/2645575

blakeperdue• 14 years ago

Browser support? Any idea if this works in IE7/8?

Timmy_C• 14 years ago

No IE7/8 support because it doesn't do CSS generated content or the :before and :after pseudo-elements.

testify• 14 years ago

Thank you sir! This might come in handy sometimes.

PStamatiou• 14 years ago

The harder thing is getting the boxshadow to work on that.

jarek-foksa• 14 years ago

I've been writing CSS for a couple of years now and it took me like 10 minutes to understand why this is even working.

I already feel sorry for anyone that will be debugging this mess.

suyash• 14 years ago

waste of a domain name, why do people create a whole new domain name for something as simple as this, this could have easily been a blog post! (IMO)

jreeve• 14 years ago

Not that I have anything to do with it, but two issues come to mind immediately: it may be easier to get organic search traffic for the idea, and it is a good way of keeping projects nice and separate.

jqueryin• 14 years ago

This is great so long as you don't still have to support IE7.

http://css-tricks.com/browser-support-pseudo-elements/

TazeTSchnitzel• 14 years ago

In IE7 you'd just have a box without the triangle, no? Isn't that graceful degradation?

GFischer• 14 years ago

Nope, you don't have a box at all (at least on this webpage). Nor the left-side box.

It looks awful on IE7 actually, the footer also degrades un-gracefully.

benguild• 14 years ago

Finally.

necolas• 14 years ago

I made a bunch of this kind (and more complex) speech bubbles a couple of years ago: http://nicolasgallagher.com/pure-css-speech-bubbles/demo/

This is a nice little tool to help automate the production of the code for simple ones.

RoryH• 14 years ago

Brilliant, I have a use case for this, nice timing :-)

CSS arrow please

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