On the front page of a site I am building, several :hover
pseudo-class to add a border when the mouse is over them. One of
if anyone cares there is a much better way to capture focus now, $(foo).focus(...)
http://api.jquery.com/focus/
Have you thought about using mouseOver and mouseOut to simulate this. Also look into mouseEnter and mouseLeave
I had a .live("focus") event set to select() (highlight) the contents of a text input so that the user wouldn't have to select it before typing a new value.
$(formObj).select();
Because of quirks between different browsers, the select would sometimes be superseded by the click that caused it, and it would deselect the contents right after in favor of placing the cursor within the text field (worked mostly ok in FF but failed in IE)
I thought I could solve this by putting a slight delay on the select...
setTimeout(function(){$(formObj).select();},200);
This worked fine and the select would persist, but a funny problem arose.. If you tabbed from one field to the next, the focus would switch to the next field before the select took place. Since select steals focus, the focus would then go back and trigger a new "focus" event. This ended up in a cascade of input selects dancing all over the screen.
A workable solution would be to check that the field still has focus before executing the select(), but as mentioned, there's no simple way to check... I ended up just dispensing with the whole auto highlight, rather than turning what should be a single jQuery select() call into a huge function laden with subroutines...
Keep track of both states (hovered, focused) as true/false flags, and whenever one changes, run a function that removes border if both are false, otherwise shows border.
So: onfocus sets focused = true, onblur sets focused = false. onmouseover sets hovered = true, onmouseout sets hovered = false. After each of these events run a function that adds/removes border.
There is a plugin to check if an element is focused: http://plugins.jquery.com/project/focused
$('input').each(function(){
if ($(this) == $.focused()) {
$(this).addClass('focused');
}
})
Since this question has been around a while, and some new conventions have come into play, I feel that I should mention the .live
method has been depreciated.
In its place, the .on
method has now been introduced.
Their documentation is quite useful in explaining how it works;
The .on() method attaches event handlers to the currently selected set of elements in the jQuery object. As of jQuery 1.7, the .on() method provides all functionality required for attaching event handlers. For help in converting from older jQuery event methods, see .bind(), .delegate(), and .live().
So, in order for you to target the 'input focused' event, you can use this in a script. Something like:
$('input').on("focus", function(){
//do some stuff
});
This is quite robust and even allows you to use the TAB key as well.