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Make Lightbox with CSS – without Javascript

Behrouz Pooladrag — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 06:58:06 +0000

.You may call it Lightbox, or Greybox, or Thickbox, but it’s always the same effect

When you are on a page, and click on a photo or trig some event, a Lightbox is an effect that fades the pagein the background to show you new content in the foreground.

I mean this effect

In the upper example, when clicking on a photo the site fades to black and shows the photo, in the lower one when clicking on “login” the site fades to white and shows the login form.

There are tons of Lightbox scripts in the web, each one with its unique features and limitations, but all require massive use of Javascript or the installation of javascript frameworks.

In some cases, there are “lightweight” versions with “only” 40KB of Javascript.

This example does not want to compete with those scripts, but if you are looking for a simple, 100% CSS, 0% javascript lightbox, this may help you.

Features of this Lightbox:

100% CSS as said

You can insert any content in it (some scripts out there only allow images)

That’s all. Did you need something more? Think wisely…

Let’s start with the CSS


.black_overlay{
 display: none;
 position: absolute;
 top: 0%;
 left: 0%;
 width: 100%;
 height: 100%;
 background-color: black;
 z-index:1001;
 -moz-opacity: 0.8;
 opacity:.80;
 filter: alpha(opacity=80);
 }

 .white_content {
 display: none;
 position: absolute;
 top: 25%;
 left: 25%;
 width: 50%;
 height: 50%;
 padding: 16px;
 border: 16px solid orange;
 background-color: white;
 z-index:1002;
 overflow: auto;
 }

The black_overlay class is the layer that will make the web page seem to fade. It’s a black 80% opaque background as long and wide as the browser that will overlay the web page (look at the z-index) and at the moment is not shown (look at the display).

The white content class is the layer with the photo/login screen/whatever you want to appear in the Lightbox overlay. It’s a white layer to be placed over the black_overlay layer (look at the z-index, greater than the black_overlay one). The overflow allows you to have a scrollable content.

In the html file, put this line just before the tag


Hi, I am an happy lightbox

Now, trig the action you want to open the Lightbox and insert this code:


document.getElementById('light').style.display='block';
document.getElementById('fade').style.display='block';

For example, in a link would be:


Click me

Remember to include in the lightbox the code to close it, for example

Hide me

A complete example page could be

LIGHTBOX EXAMPLE

This is the main content. To display a lightbox click here

This is the lightbox content. Close

That you can find up and running in this page.

In this example everything is static and preloaded, but you can easily add some php/ajax code to make it more dynamic while keeping the effect 100% CSS based.

Hope you will find it useful, should you use it in one of your works send me a comment and I’ll feature your site as example.

Edit the CSS styles of an element in Javascript

Behrouz Pooladrag — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 05:30:59 +0000

I’ve actually started to learn the Internet beast JavaScript, and I think it’s about time I shared some knowledge I’ve gathered from problems I had when starting out.

The first of which is CSS styles. When starting out, one of the basic things I wanted to do was to change what the user sees dynamically. Not an easy task when there are few good examples online.

One of the first things you have to do is be able to find which element you want to change. For this you have to do a bit of “DOM” navigating, this scary thing is the Document Object Model, I don’t fully understand it yet myself, but from what little I do know, it reduces the HTML tags to objects. But that’s for another tutorial.

Here is an example basic HTML doc (with some inline JavaScript):



Untitled Document

OK, so we’ve got a table and a class of “CellClass” applied to the cells. Also we have a JS function that runs once the body of our page has loaded.

Now, let’s edit that with JS! (all code below will be placed where “// code to go here” is in our JavaScript)

First, lets get a reference to one of our cells:

document.getElementById('Cell01')

Then we browse through to the style:

document.getElementById('Cell01').style.backgroundColor = '#000000';

That’s it! Test your page in a browser and see your background colour change!

Please note that this does not effect the actual class, this simply applies a style that overrides the class.

If anybody knows a method of actually altering the CSS classes, I’m open to suggestions!

Make Lightbox without JavaScript!

Behrouz Pooladrag — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 05:22:50 +0000

You may call it Lightbox, or Greybox, or Thickbox, but it’s always the same effect.