I wish the details element would support different labels (provided by the summary tag) for its open and closed states.
Consider a label of "Closed, click to open" when the details element is closed and "Open, click to close" when open:
Sadly only one summary tag is supported by the details element. However you can use an empty summary with a ::before pseudo-element to implement this.
Save the following to a file:
<html>
<body>
<style>
#widget1 div { padding-inline-start: 1em; max-width: 20em;}
#widget1 summary::before { content: "Closed, click to open";}
#widget1[open] summary::before { content: "Open, click to close";}
#widget1[open] summary { height: 2em;}
</style>
<p> Text before details.</p>
<details id="widget1">
<summary></summary>
<div>
A widget can be in one of two states. The default closed
state displays only the triangle and the label inside summary
(or a user agent-defined default string if no summary).
</div>
</details>
<p>Text after details.</p>
<body>
</html>
to experiment.
The second and third style lines are where the magic happens.
Note that it might not be accessible. I didn't try to see if adding a live region aria label to the summary would cause the label change to be announced. I suspect it will not, but refining this is left as an exercise for the reader. Add your experimental findings to the comments below.
Top comments (4)
Well, content in css is not that great especially when your dealing with translations. I guess a simple way to do it is to have 2
<span>s and toggle them depending on theopenattribute, but I do agree it's not ideal.Ah interesting interesting idea. So:
with:
Nice idea.
Nice. For some reason I was thinking on a js solution, but this css solution most definitely works too.
Hi Elena:
Yeah, I try to stay away from JS whenever possible. Using CSS and HTML provides better performance.
Removing JS whenever possible makes the web less fragile.
Hence the original reason for the post. Plus this is probably more accessible as well.
-- rouilj