Question

"Dim" the page content

Asked by: qwertq

I want to simulate "dimming" the page and placing a div centered on the screen as a dialog box.

I thought of streching a div to 100% x 100% of screen size and then just using bg color black with alpha and then putting another div inside it as the dialong.

is this the best way to go?

can i just alpha the <body>?

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Asked On
2006-01-06 at 16:09:44ID21687452
Tags

dim

,

div

,

page

Topic

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

Participating Experts
4
Points
100
Comments
6

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Answers

 

by: RoonaanPosted on 2006-01-06 at 16:13:30ID: 15634816

If you alpha the body you would be alphaing your dialog also.

You could try though to have a wrapper setup like this, where you do the alpha trick on the content div:

<body>
  <div id="dialog" style="display:none">..we use this to display a dialog later one..</div>
  <div id="wrapper">
  .... all the sites other contents
  </div>
</body>

-r-

 

by: qwertqPosted on 2006-01-06 at 16:30:31ID: 15634916

whats the best way to make a div 100% of screen in order to center it?

 

by: neesterPosted on 2006-01-06 at 22:43:18ID: 15636027

There are a few ways.

One way would be to stretch a Div 100% over the page, and make it the top layer.
and have a background image of a checkerboard.

PLESK does this.

 

by: ljo8877Posted on 2006-01-06 at 23:24:20ID: 15636101

You may find it better to change the text color (and if necessary the background color) to a darker color  and not use the div and alpha. Many browsers don't support alpha and IE and the others that do, do it differently. This will achieve your affect and avoid the centering question (maybe, see next).

Without a specified width, a block element, like a div, takes the full (100%) width available and minimum height. You would have only to specify height 100%; although, that is not always consistent across browsers in getting it to the bottom of the window.

To center a box with a specified width and height in a space, position it absolutely and then use negative margins of half the boxes dimension like this:

#centered-box {
     width: 200px;
     height: 200px;
     position: absolute;
     top: 50%;
     left: 50%;
     margin-top: -100px;
     margin-left: -100px;
}

 

by: kibatsuPosted on 2006-01-08 at 14:31:06ID: 15643968

I've used the technique neester propses before too. The advantage of this is that the mask DIV covers the whole page, and so stops the user clicking other links/controls on the page (more like a true dialog). If you use a checkboard gif (4x4 pixels, with alternating grey/transparent colours) you don't need to worry about how browsers handle transparency.

If you're just worried about the visual 'dimming', another method would be to define a separate set of styles based on a body selector for the dimmed colour scheme. Then to dim everything on the page, just swap the class on the body element with Javascript.

body.dimmed {
color:#DDDDDD;
background-color:#DDDDDD;
}

You'll need to make sure your dialog styling uses a specific selector so it overrides the .dimmed on the body. Using an ID (and optionally !important) should work:

#dialog {
color:#000000;
background-color:#FFFFFF;
}

 

by: neesterPosted on 2006-01-08 at 20:56:31ID: 15646024

Thanks for the A.

Hope my suggestion helped!

Cheers,
- Chris

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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