Zach Leatherman

YUI Button Lite

23 March 2007

Warning

This article is fairly old and probably contains information that is no longer relevant. Read with care!

Do you want the cool clean look of the new YUI Button component, but without all the seedy overhead of split buttons or button groups or components that shouldn’t even be pigeonholed into a button component to begin with? Keep in mind that this approach only works for the method called “Using pre-defined Button Control HTML.

Well, here’s the trick to do it.

Create the button as the YUI Button Examples and Documentation say to do so. Include the Button CSS file button/assets/button.css. But just don’t include the YUI JavaScript file button-beta[-min].js.

Instead, use the following JavaScript to replace the functions for button coloring for hover, focus, and active.

YAHOO.util.Event.addListener( window, 'load', function( e )
{
    var yuiButtons = YAHOO.util.Dom.getElementsByClassName( 'yuibutton', 'span' );
    YAHOO.util.Event.addListener( yuiButtons, 'mouseover', function( e )
    {
        YAHOO.util.Dom.addClass( this, 'hover' );
    } );
    YAHOO.util.Event.addListener( yuiButtons, 'mouseout', function( e )
    {
        YAHOO.util.Dom.removeClass( this, 'hover' );
    } );
    YAHOO.util.Event.addListener( yuiButtons, 'mousedown', function( e )
    {
        YAHOO.util.Dom.addClass( this, 'active' );
    } );
    YAHOO.util.Event.addListener( yuiButtons, 'mouseup', function( e )
    {
        YAHOO.util.Dom.removeClass( this, 'active' );
    } );
    YAHOO.util.Event.addListener( yuiButtons, 'focus', function( e )
    {
        YAHOO.util.Dom.addClass( this, 'focus' );
    } );
    YAHOO.util.Event.addListener( yuiButtons, 'blur', function( e )
    {
        YAHOO.util.Dom.removeClass( this, 'focus' );
    } );
} );

If you’re just using the standard buttons anyway, you’re going to see a speed improvement in performance on hover color changes.

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Zach Leatherman is a Professional Front End Engineer. He loves building for the web and has been writing here since 2007.

He enjoys spending time with his beautiful wife Traci and their two Great Danes, Roxie and Ella. They also have a cat, a rabbit, goldfish, and usually one or more tarantulas. Read more »